The modern fan has an incomprehensible amount of information at their fingertips. With social media, search engines, ticketing platforms, and tools like streaming and chat, fans today can connect with their favorite teams and players in ways that were impossible even 10 years ago.
While the evolution of this technology is revolutionizing modern fandom in many ways, it’s also creating unique challenges for sports franchises. For a long time, the teams themselves were the go-to source of information for their fans. Fans would buy tickets directly from the team, learn about the players through a program sold by the team, and buy their merchandise through the team store — all interaction was directly with the team itself.
Today, that same fan likely buys tickets through a third party, uses Google and social media for roster updates, and buys fan gear from a licensed online retailer. These are key interactions that many teams across professional sports are missing out on, and the impact can be profound. With fewer organic interactions directly with the fans, teams can miss out on crucial data and insights into fan behavior, in addition to the revenue generated by selling directly to fans.
So, how are teams adapting? What can they do to reconnect with fans AND recapture valuable interactions?
Conversational chat offers an invaluable solution to this evolving challenge. It’s no secret that teams and brands are turning to personalized chat solutions to answer inbound questions and save essential staff bandwidth, but that’s only a piece of the puzzle. The average fan uses a chat feature to ask a question about ticketing — but what happens when that question gets answered? With one-way conversations, the answer to a fan’s question is the end of the interaction with little chance of the fan returning to the conversation in the future. GameOn Technology sees chat differently, offering a chat solution built for two-way engagement between teams and their fans.
These sticky experiences drive repeat conversations, real-time engagement, marketing segmentation, and revenue-generating opportunities in ways no other interactive medium can. A great example of the stickiness of conversational chat comes from one of GameOn’s league partners, where each user sent an average of 34 inbound messages during the 2021–22 league season.
“When a partner sees its users send an average of 30+ messages throughout a season, it really speaks to how much fans are enjoying interacting with the team through chat,” said Harry Valentgas, Senior Customer Success Manager at GameOn. “We use chat to create engagement in a way that actually strengthens the bonds between fans and the teams they love.”
"We use chat to create engagement in a way that actually strengthens the bonds between fans and the teams they love."
In order to engage the modern fan, a chat solution has to go beyond the simplicity of answering logistical questions. Simply put, fans will not continue coming back — not beyond asking basic questions — if the functionality is limited to answering FAQ’s. Chat needs to empower teams to keep up with the engagement power of search engines and social media by owning the interactions that typically take place on those platforms. That’s why hearing a statistic like 73% of all fan messages for a specific league partner requested real-time game updates, highlights, roster info, and scheduling is so meaningful.
When a fan asks for game highlights from their favorite team through the chat function on the team’s website, everyone wins. The fan gets the real-time engagement they’re looking for and feels like they’re being personally cared for by the team they love. No other channel offers such an intimately personalized interaction for fans.
Observing user behavior through chat is a valuable source of data for teams as they seek to understand customer intent and generate marketing segmentation. In a chat environment where fans can converse with teams about game tickets and fan gear, teams are afforded a unique opportunity to customize the experience for fans based on their interests.
Learn how a CRM integration can unlock valuable fan insights
