The proliferation of devices and ways to stay connected to sports presents as much opportunities as it does challenges. The volume of noise permeates as much engagement as it does distraction. These realities counteract one another and likely won’t go away anytime soon.
At the crux of these matters, deciphering or delineating data becomes imperative to try to get a better sense of fans’ thought processes and actions.
With a long history of working with pro sports teams, Vision Critical, a Vancouver-based company, has witness firstand the countless, new consumer-facing problems they deal with, be it ticket sales, in-venue entertainment, and corporate partnerships. These issues are predicated by the ever-changing nature of fan behavior, especially its interrelationship with how the game is consumed. There’s an expedited need to read and respond accordingly in order to maximize the experience on multiple levels.
Real-time results requires real-time insights.
Since providing their customer intelligence platform to likes of the New York Knicks, New York Rangers, and Toronto Maple Leafs, Vision Critical has now created its Sports Fan Council module. This solution strives to answer the aforementioned troubles through capturing the collective opinions of fans, where pertinent insights rise to the top of mind insofar as leading to more prudent decisions.
Vision Critical’s Chief Technology Officer, Kobi Ofir, mentions to SportTechie that this new product complements with its existing Vision Critical Insight Community utility. It’s available as an add-on component to the latter to their prior customers or on its own to new ones. Either use case serving as a hub to centralize and gather this information.
“The solution allows teams to build member profiles for fans as they evolve, deploy regular fan engagement projects, leverage the sports fan intelligence library pre-programmed with fan activities created to address the key challenge areas for sports teams, analyze member feedback, and share actionable insight with key stakeholders to drive better outcomes,” states Ofir.
The Sports Fan Council, specifically, intends to provide more than the average customer intelligence platforms in the market. The pre-designed, built-in activities coupled with questionnaires are not only mechanisms to discern fans’ present preferences–likes or dislikes–but what they would like for the future. All the feedback can be assessed within the medium, itself, across the board for respective areas of focus.
That’s what the end-user from the team-side gets facilitated with, but the fans, themselves, also partake with this property.
Fans’ voice is “empowered” via the Sports Fan Council insofar as a vehicle in which to be directly heard from. Here, they can weigh in on any issue revolving their experience that’s noteworthy–regardless of how nuanced or extensive it might be. In a sense, it’s an inclusive, yet private home where concerns or ideas can take place.
“Unlike ad hoc surveys or social media channels, teams with the Sports Fan Council benefit from having ongoing conversations with fans that want to be a part of their online community,” Ofir believes.
Vision Critical’s experience in other industries, like retail and financial services, further supports their position to offer a separate, individualized platform solely–an extension to other efforts–for sports. The ability by consumers today to have access to a streamline process for researching and purchasing products, especially, enables them to be more cognizant of what and how something is pitched to them–an underlying premise for this company to partner with pro teams.
“Vision Critical Insight Communities drive engagement, so that brands and teams can learn what customers and fans think (and they act in certain ways) in a way that is interactive, thoughtful, and secure. This helps build brand trust and, in sports, team loyalty,” says Ofir.
At its core, this service aims to modernize how sports teams interact with digital native fans, especially power users.
Rather than perusing and trying to digest from conventional research surveys that tend to be too long and don’t reveal real-time insights by fans, the Sports Fan Council creates a long-tail approach between teams and fans relations. The feedback is collected in an efficient and quick fashion, so teams can make the most of their time. This platform plans to to produce a more representative outlook of fans than social media analytics, on-demand, and dovetailing the primary concerns affecting both parties. And it’s flexible to be integrated with various systems, as APIs that are open.
Once a team’s Sport Fan Council is instituted, they can immediately begin engaging with their fans. The benefit of having fans voluntarily choose to be included in this community is that they’re highly interested of informing their needs to the teams, provided the latter identifies something they’d like a response on. A receptive dialogue materializes, which continues to be cultivated over time.
“The more a team engages its fans for insights, they more they will see the effects, as that insight is deployed in the real world,” Ofir says.
The Knicks, as one of their clients, can serve as a case study to what Vision Critical can accomplish for fellow pro teams. The Knicks came to them because fan engagement and satisfaction are aspects increasingly important that they want to improve upon.
“Through their Vision Critical Insight Community, they found they could capture feedback from thousands of fans to deliver a world-class experience. In the past year, the Knicks Fan Panel has been used to better understand everything from their fans’ music preferences, the types of entertainment that drive in-game engagement, to the kinds of food and beverages they want served at games,” explains Ofir.
“Though they are not yet customers of the Sports Fan Council solution, they’ve been turning to the Vision Critical Insight Community product to engage with fans for feedback and insight, helping the New York Knicks deliver an exceptional in-game experience,” Ofir continued.
Fans, naturally, are much more invested in their favorite team when they know their opinions about several matters are seriously being considered; and appropriate actions are taken shortly thereafter to placate them.
Vision Critical’s latest customer intelligence solution lens a common ground to be formed between teams and fans, where listening, interaction, and timeliness fosters greater loyalty.
