Insights from António Gonçalves
Sport’s digital transformation often conjures images of fans watching live sport from their mobile phones and C-suite executives analyzing fan-engagement graphs and virtual operations data. Albeit both are pertinent examples for how digital solutions are shaping modern sports consumption, the ways in which organizations communicate with their membership or client base are just as important for creating a frictionless user experience (UX).
In response, this has established something that is becoming a staple for the industry’s digital transition. As part of this process, customer portals are proving to be valuable assets for sports entities seeking to simplify their dataflow and maximize the customer relationship. Meanwhile, they also present a platform whereby individual stakeholders are able to proactively manage their own data and customize their unique processes.
Customer portals can take different forms. By way of example, this might look like a dedicated platform where the rights holder and its rights partners can collaborate on the creation of segmented digital fan-engagement campaigns based on real-time fan data and user insights.
This was an approach taken by the organizers of the 2021 British & Irish Lions Tour of South Africa, which saw the launch of a fully integrated Lions Media Portal that granted the invitational rugby union team’s entire sponsorship and media partnerships exclusive access to social video content personalized to their respective brands, via their own, dedicated partner dashboards built within the portal itself.
With fans unable to attend the tour due to Covid-19 restrictions, the portal provided a unique opportunity for the Lions and its stakeholder partners to transform the at-home fan experience and a different way for the organization to communicate and execute digital fan-engagement campaigns related to its sponsors via a single, centralized content hub.
Elsewhere, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) leverages customer-centric portals in other ways. For example, the IOC grants Olympians access to a variety of resources via its Athlete365 portal, which supports athletes on topics such as personal wellbeing, finance, and their individual Games program. In partnership with Adecco, the platform also incorporates Athlete365 Career+, which supports athletes on their career path post-competition via virtual workshops and educational content.
“The customer portal is an innovative way for sports bodies, leagues, clubs, and unions to centralize their digital solutions via a single platform that offers its stakeholders exclusive access to valuable resources and personalized content, and for athletes to stay up to date with their competition data,” explains António Gonçalves, Junior Consultant at N3XT Sports.
“Centralizing information in this way offers the customer or client convenient access to their data via an easy-to-navigate, mobile-supported server, while also granting the platform owner a 360° view of its membership base. As a result, the customer portal provides both an improved customer experience (CX) and optimizes the portal owner’s ability to track and respond quickly to customer and stakeholder requests.”
MEMBER PORTALS ADVOCATE FIRST-PARTY DATA COLLECTION
While the customer portal provides a convenient location for users to find the information that is relevant to them, it also provides the portal owner with the ability to extract first-party data via a unique member registration that invites its membership base to share personal data upon logging into the portal.
As sports organizations explore new ways to enhance their data-collection capability, member portals of this kind prove not only to be valuable assets for improving the UX, but are also designed to maximize the extraction and usage of member data. This, in turn, supports the portal owner’s knowledge of the stakeholder’s unique interests while providing them with a platform capable of adapting and scaling to meet their individual needs.
“If we look across the industry, rights holders are also utilizing customer portals to integrate their digital product portfolio. This allows the portal owner to simplify its data management and leverage data to tailor its communications with the individual users.”
António Gonçalves, Junior Consultant at N3XT Sports
For example, the Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) enlisted the services of N3XT Sports to provide the footballers’ union’s members with a modern, data-driven service. As part of its digitalization process, our team helped develop and implement the PFA’s first-ever fully integrated, cloud-based member portal, which both eliminates the use of paper-based processes inside the organization and acts as a direct line of communication between the union, its members, and stakeholders.
“Whereas previously the PFA was reliant on paper-heavy communications and transactions with its tens of thousands of members, the newly designed member portal has turned the union into a paperless operation that both heightens the UX and increases operational efficiencies within the PFA itself,” explains Gonçalves. “Since launching its member portal, whereas previously the union relied on paper-based communications with its members, which reduced productivity and data efficiency, the PFA has significantly increased its ability to capture and harness its members’ data, and its overall data-analysis capability.”
Once communications have been established between both parties, the member portal provides a platform for the service owner to distribute personalized campaigns to its members. “This might be based on their membership status, for example, or the ability to provide members with access to discounts and special offers for partner products, services, and commercial partnerships,” Gonçalves expands.
“It represents a key transition. While websites were always general, informative and abstract, portals are designed to provide a more personalized experience resembling one-on-one conversations, where members have the ability to manage and control their own data and processes. This results in a greater level of customization and tailored functionality. A step forward for many organizations, as it enables them to provide a user-centric experience for their audiences.”
WHAT’S N3XT?
Building a centralized communications hub that enhances the UX is an artform unto itself. Just as the industry is focused on developing direct-to-consumer (D2C) activations that help sports entities grow audiences and retain subscriptions, the design of a customer portal should align, first and foremost, with the rights holder’s operational objectives and provide capacity to scale its user-engagement and data-collection capabilities.
“If we look across the industry, rights holders are utilizing customer portals to integrate their digital product portfolio,” Gonçalves says. “This allows the portal owner to simplify its data management and leverage data to tailor its communications with the individual users, whether they be fans, players, coaches, teams, leagues, sponsors, media stakeholders, and, in the case of the PFA, the union’s membership base.”
As it stands, customer portals are particularly popular among multi-stakeholder organizations, with a focus on building commercial partnerships. However, individual entities are demonstrating new opportunities for connecting with their ecosystem via membership portals. Cited in our World Cup Data Report 2022, the Japan Football Association (JFA) and its JFA ID registration portal grants subscribers unlimited access to various digital services, including the JFA’s dedicated ticketing and ecommerce platforms, made available via the JFA Passport mobile app.
Meanwhile, the Royal Belgian Football Association (RBFA) also utilizes its membership ID via the RBFA #DEVILTIME mobile app. “There are options for us to develop both the fan and player experiences [as] part of our ongoing digital roadmap,” explains Arnaud Lieutenant, the RBFA’s Digital, Innovation, and Technology Director. “Our objective is to develop a unique overview of everyone who engages with the RBFA product, who we are interacting with, and how we go about it.”
Our team at N3XT Sports works tirelessly to develop and implement digital and data strategies across a multitude of sports properties at federation level, competition level, and club level. To learn more about how to implement a customer portal into your organization, fill out the form below and we’ll be in touch. Our goal is to drive the digitalization of the sports industry and our clients.