“We help premier-level sporting clubs engage with their members and fans on a more personal level, leading to higher customer satisfaction scores, better brand awareness and positioning, and greater customer lifetime value.”
Ignite Solutions has deep experience with CRM systems, especially the Microsoft Dynamics family. A particular focus of Ignite’s is bringing our expertise in these systems to sporting clubs and organisations. Ignite has worked with major Rugby League clubs, and has worked closely with the major Ticketing providers, the NRL itself, and other third parties on a number of projects. We believe that the coming decade will see the leading sporting clubs in Australia look to take advantage of specialised sports-specific CRM systems to increase their internal efficiencies and better serve their customers, members and fans. Ignite Solutions are well paced to assist your clubs to take advantage of these new tools.
Single View of Members and Fans
A big advantage to deploying a CRM system in your clubs is to provide a “single pane of glass view” of all your members and fans in one system. A lot of clubs hold member information in their ticketing system, with fan or prospect records held in the Marketing Automation system.
This quickly causes headaches if the two systems aren’t closely integrated. How can you ensure that prospecting campaigns aren’t being sent to people who’ve already purchased a membership? How can you identify your valued members for special offers and preferential treatment? How do you manage updates to personal details when there may be multiple records for a single person in different systems?
A Person-Centric View
Traditionally, membership details are held in the membership or ticketing system. Prospect details are held elsewhere. The Corporate team probably have their own database/excel file of their high-value Corporate contacts. Sponsorship no doubt have their own repository as well.
Quite often though, the same person may exist in multiple areas. By deploying a CRM system, a club can move away from this “department-centric” view, and refocus on a “person-centric” view. For instance, this is Bob Jones. He has a family membership, but his business is also a sponsor of the club. Included in the sponsorship deal, Bob has a corporate package for the current season. By viewing Bob as the single person that he is, great improvements in both reporting ability and customer service can easily be achieved.
Continuity in Customer Service
A CRM system empowers your front-line sales and service teams to deliver a higher quality of service to your members and fans. By holding a complete history of interaction with each contact, including membership purchase history and communications, a customer can be provided with a very high level of service that picks up where the last conversation left off.
By providing your front-line staff with up to date, contextual information about the people they’re talking to, better problem resolutions happen faster, and most effective conversations take place - the customer ends the engagement feeling less like a number and more like a valued member of the club.
Management Reporting and Insights
By introducing a sports-specific CRM, senior management of the club gain visibility into a number of key reports and metrics to inform better decisions in quicker time periods. Renewal and outreach campaigns can be closely monitored as they roll out without any need to tax staff time to produce reports or compile numbers. Likewise, financial projections for upcoming games can be managed in advance - what games are sold out? What games still have corporate facilities available? How are we tracking against our budgets at any point in the season (for both full-season memberships as well as casual game sales)?
Most likely you can manually produce these types of reports now, but they probably take time and are error-prone. A good CRM system will put this information at the touch of your fingertips.