8x8 Takes Gold in Sports When it Comes to Customer Experience
Summer is here and that brings with it not only (hopefully) good weather but also a feast of international sporting events across the globe, engaging with millions of fans. It’s a fantastic opportunity for clubs and brands across many sports to be connecting and engaging with people, reinforcing their relationship with existing fans and building new ones.
At the heart of that is delivering an outstanding customer experience (CX). Customer Experience is massively important in sports. Clubs need that connection with fans and other interested parties.
Good fan engagement is all about great customer - and employee - experience
Regardless of what sport you are talking about, fans are the lifeblood of the game. That means you need to be engaging with them on their terms and their platforms of choice. That might be chat, it might be phone, through social media - there’s a lot of ways now that fans expect that engagement with their clubs.
For clubs and sporting organisations this can be a challenge. Different teams can be handling different aspects. For example, the ticket office isn’t arranging dinners at the club restaurant for example, or parking queries or sponsorship matters, so clubs need tools in place to not only handle this but also be able to record and measure it to see what’s working, what isn’t, and where there’s room for improvement.
As well as a winning customer experience you also want a superior employee experience–tools that don’t get in the road of them helping customers. Good employee experience solutions help to deliver an even better customer experience.
To drive that winning approach with fans and staff, you need a solid contact center and engagement solution. At 8x8 we’re fortunate to have a number of well-known global brands to work with that deliver superior business communications and customer experience.
Southampton Football Club
Southampton FC needed a premier league contact center solution to match their ambitions of getting back to English football’s top flight. As Huw Fielding, Director of IT at Southampton said: “8x8’s software is vital in helping us provide fans and customers contacting the club with a seamless experience. Their reliable contact center solutions and professional service are a huge benefit to the IT department here at Saints.”
But we score in more than just football…
Anaheim Ducks
With the Ducks, we managed to bring in thousands of pounds/dollars in cost savings while also giving staff more working flexibility, helping deliver a superior fan experience and integrate well with their Microsoft Office and Single Sign-On integrations.
See what Jacqueline Slope, Vice President of Information Technology said about working with 8x8.
Swim England
We also made a splash with Swim England, helping them deliver 35% cost savings as they moved from ISDN communications to a more flexible and productive state-of-the-art cloud communications system that meets the needs of their agile workforce. Kalpesh Parmar, Head of IT at Swim England told us: “If I could sum up 8x8 in one word, it would be 'intuitive'."
Altoona Curve
This baseball team was ahead of the curve when it came to delivering a superior customer experience. Collaboration and sales efforts were improved after making the switch to 8x8. Learn more here.
Kansas City Royals
This well-known baseball team wanted a deeper understanding of customer conversations. Their previous system had issues with tracking, quantifying, and reporting, with zero visibility into the nature of the calls. That all changed when they moved to 8x8. As Brian Himstedt, CIO and Vice President of Technology & Business Analytics for the Royals, said: "I'm an 8x8 fan because it reduces the work that my staff has to do on a day-to-day basis."
Read more from Brian on the 8x8 difference here.
We shoot, we score!
The football (or soccer) season is just about to kick off in Europe and 8x8 scores there too! As well as Southampton FC we work with the likes of Leicester City, Hibs, Falkirk FC, Brentford, Reading FC, Dumbarton FC, and Leeds United.
Our sporting endeavors aren’t limited there though. We also work with Glasgow Clan Ice Hockey, the United States Professional Tennis Association, Scottish Rugby Union, and Swimbrite Swimming School. Where there’s a sport and successful CX, there’s 8x8.
