A question of sport: delivering better customer experiences

While sports fans aren’t the most transient supporters, poor in-person experiences can heavily impact merchandise, food and beverage sales and gate receipts, limiting a club’s ability to finance growth. Ensuring your fans have a great event day experience is critical to maximising revenue, and that all starts with a positive customer service experience.

Which is part of the problem. Sports organisations’ customer service is often very basic. They might use Outlook to manage incoming enquiries, for example. They’ll typically only be active on a few social channels, and replies can be sporadic if you’re lucky enough to get one at all. In short, many sports organisations fall short of the ‘positive customer experience’ element.

In the run-up to any sporting event, there’s an uptick in customer contacts. That will likely peak on the day itself and then rapidly decline in the days following the event. During this time, the customer service team will need to be able to scale up and scale down rapidly. But rather than hiring extra staff for short periods, which can prove prohibitively expensive, automation is the answer.

The right tools

Which tools sports organisations use is crucial to being able to scale successfully. Sports clubs tend to have a relatively small number of customer service operatives (perhaps around five to ten), yet many use enterprise-level solutions, which have a vast range of features but are overly complex for most sports organisations’ needs. Most clubs simply don’t need the complexity of an enterprise-level solution.

It’s with these applications in mind that Mobile Service Cloud was created. It’s a solution for organisations that receive a large number of contacts frequently, but that need to scale quickly as the need arises. It’s a flexible solution backed by 24/7/365 customer support and a tiered pricing structure that offers adaptability for organisations that need to ramp up their customer service offering as events approach.

Out-of-hours support

Mobile Service Cloud also offers the automation elements that sports organisations need to cope with the ebb and flow of customer contacts, whether that’s enquiries about gate times, ticket validity, or directions to the stadium. Then there’s out-of-hours customer support. Chatbots and voicebots offer organisations the ability to provide self-serve options out-of-hours and triage customer contacts with skills-based routing during office hours to prevent agent overload.

Modern sports fans want to contact clubs on their favourite channels, such as Instagram or WhatsApp. That requires an omnichannel solution to manage conversations across multiple platforms, with customer contacts sometimes switching between channels as they evolve. Mobile Service Cloud’s agent inbox allows agents to follow conversations across platforms and stay on top of messages from different channels in one conversational view. That means they’re less likely to miss important customer service queries. It also means they can keep tabs on internal conversations with other agents or third-party partners, alongside the ability to snooze conversations and return to them at a later date when appropriate.

All of this puts customer service teams in the best position possible to deliver great customer experiences that keep fans coming back for more.

Formula One Dutch Grand Prix ‘Race Engineer’

As part of CM.com’s partnership with the Dutch Grand Prix, we created the Race Engineer chatbot to help fans navigate the weekend. This scripted chatbot could be accessed via WhatsApp on our Mobile Service Cloud product.

The Race Engineer allowed fans to ask questions about logistics, ticketing and the like, with the ‘bot providing simple, straightforward answers without human intervention. In the event the chatbot could not answer, the query was automatically assigned to a human agent, using skills-based routing to ensure the customer reached an agent with the skills and knowledge to help them.

The Dutch Grand Prix organisers received thousands of messages via the Race Engineer in the run-up to the event and during race weekend.

Mobile Service Cloud has a host of features designed to help you scale your customer service offering as you grow. Let’s schedule a call to discuss how we can help you to manage your customer service requirements and costs more effectively.