How do fans behave at Charlotte Hornets games? Generally speaking, it is probably similar to other professional sports fans.
They’ve obviously purchased a ticket to gain admission, but there are dozens of other touch points after entering the arena. From buying concessions and grabbing apparel at the team store to interacting on social media throughout the game, there’s more than enough data to capture.
“The real challenge is consolidating all of the behavior across all of these channels,” said Ben Davis, CEO of Phizzle, an engagement automation software company. “That really gives you a true picture of who that individual really is.
“…Having that insight in real time and measuring how someone is feeling at any moment in time, it then enables a team or a sponsor to be able to react to that person with the right content and the right offers, but more importantly, through the right channels and in the right context.”
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The Hornets recently partnered with Phizzle and SAP to utilize Phizzle’s FanTracker™ API and data management solutions, which is powered by SAP HANA®. The Hornets’ implementation of Phizzle’s Engagement Automation platform is the first use by a professional sports team.
“For years, the Hornets had been using a CRM as their “de facto” data warehouse,” said Chris Zeppenfeld, Senior Director of Business Intelligence. “However, we started to see that we’re stretching the limits of what CRM can handle when we started pushing these new data sources into it.”
Zeppenfeld further explained that a traditional CRM is not the ideal place to track three million rows of food and beverage transactional data each game. He and his intelligence team identified anywhere from 12-15 separate databases where fans had given the Hornets data.
One of the main frustrations was that none of the databases communicated with each other, so it made it increasingly harder for the team to understand their fans and how they were interacting with the organization. Through the use of the FanTracker™, the Hornets compiled 25 million fan and consumer interactions, streamlined their data warehouse and ultimately saved over $1.5 million in consulting.
Despite never finishing better than a seven seed in the playoffs over the last seven seasons, Zeppenfeld credited the team being a top five NBA franchise for new full season ticket sales each year, at least in part, to its use of cutting-edge technology on the business front.
“I think our team naturally has this inclination to be at the forefront of those new technologies that can directly help the business side increase revenue,” said Zeppenfeld, adding that the Hornets were one of the first professional teams to purchase a CRM and data warehouse. “We’ve been early adopters in almost every phase that I see Business Intelligence departments in sports go through.”