It wasn’t all that long ago that stadiums were empty, cardboard cutouts surrounded the seating bowls of arenas, and announcers were calling games in their pajamas. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically altered the sports world and the seismic shifts in the landscape are still being felt. For many sports teams that meant downsizing front offices, looking for additional financial efficiencies, and altering the fan experience. For many of GameOn Technology’s sports clients, that meant looking for new ways to support teams with limited bandwidth and strained resources.
The Challenge:
Teams across professional sports had to juggle the prospect of welcoming fans back to their stadiums while re-engaging a core segment of their fandom. On top of that, many teams were hamstrung by pandemic-related staffing shortages and a higher rate of staff turnover in key sales and service-related roles.
Adding to the challenge ahead of these teams was the fans themselves. After 400+ days away from the stadium, they had questions — and a whole lot of them. New COVID-19 arena policies were just the tip of the iceberg for the hundreds of thousands of fans with new questions about everything from where to park on game day to how to download their tickets.
These questions consume valuable time and resources, overwhelming busy ticketing staff, who are left to provide fans with answers that are often easy to find with a simple search of the team’s website. One franchise reported between 15,000 to 20,000 chats per month — an astounding volume of conversation that commands time, personnel, and ultimately money that most franchises could not afford to spend.
An Innovative Solution:
The solution for these teams was GameOn’s highly-personalized conversational chat experience specifically tailored to the needs of each franchise. This innovative offering gave fans the ability to engage with their favorite teams immediately, and on the platform of their choice — whether that be the team’s website, mobile app, or through Facebook Messenger. Fans who would have previously called or emailed the team to ask about their bag policy or for information on student ticket pricing now had the answers to almost all of their questions at their fingertips.
GameOn’s authentic intelligence opened the door for these fans to go beyond asking simple questions — allowing them to engage through chat in ways that simply weren’t possible before. Fans used chat to find out about game schedules, ask about stats and roster info, shop for a specific player’s gear, watch highlights, and so much more.
The greatest immediate impact of this new solution for GameOn’s partners came in the form of time savings. With aforementioned staffing challenges threatening to overwhelm front offices, one of GameOn’s league and franchise partners managed to save nearly 1,000 hours of staff time at the franchise level during an entire season – on top of managing over 5 million messages between fans and the franchises.
“Across all of our professional sports partners, including top teams in the NBA, NFL, NHL, and Premier League, we have implemented a solution that seamlessly handles the endless stream of inbound messages these groups receive throughout the year,” said Harry Valentgas, Senior Customer Success Manager at GameOn. “We’ve saved these franchises thousands of human hours and done so in an engaging way that keeps fans coming back for more conversation.”
The Extra Mile
In addition to saving time for leagues and teams, GameOn’s solution also extends the window in which teams can generate a two-way conversation with fans. Because games are often scheduled outside of the traditional 9 to 5 workday, traditional methods dictate that either fans are left waiting nearly a day (or a weekend) for a response or staff must work unconventional hours to handle fan demand. This wasn’t the case for GameOn’s partners — even though they received nearly half of their inbound messages outside of conventional working hours, there was no need for fans to wait or for staff to stress.
“This is a technology that these franchises and their fans love,” said Valentgas. “When fans aren’t left waiting for hours for a response to an essential question and team staff members aren’t inundated with messages at 10pm on gameday, it’s a win-win for everyone involved.”
