STADIUM CX
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Every Day is Different Huw gave a “Firepit Chat” with Jamie
CX tools for a broad range of customers
Snaddon, 8x8’s Managing Director, EMEA. Huw’s been in IT for 15 years, been with Southampton FC club for 8 years, and been in the IT director role for 18 months. Interestingly, Huw commented that his role has certainly evolved from one of a ‘traditional’ IT role to, in his words, more of a “CSP, MSP kind of thing”. Other than the fact that Huw is probably living the dream of quite a few people combining IT and a football club, what is fascinating is what he gets up to on a daily basis, the levels of technology going into the operations, and the stadium in particular. One day Huw could be dealing with the Premier League to co-ordinate how much data they need to come into the stadium, confronting how to improve 4K and 8K video storage for football analysts so that they can record and simultaneously access the data remotely, and on another day looking after the infrastructure that serves the clubs’ customers. Huw viewed his customers as “the 400 or so people that work for the club, but also the 30,000 fans that turn up every other week, and then everyone that’s wider, so the quarter of a million people in Southampton, and the overseas fans.” Huw continued, “We deal with everything from the website to ticketing, and that whole journey of how you get to the stadium. But also the new experience once you’re in the stadium as well. That’s something that not only us, but a lot of football clubs are looking at changing and improving. So there are lots of changes that we’ve made. In the last year or so we’ve put some new scoreboards up that are much bigger. We’ve got Wi-Fi out into the bowl and into all of our suites. We’re going to continue that journey and expand that out further.” With a team of six, there is certainly a lot on everyone’s plates, with more responsibilities each year.
With Huw’s roadmap in mind, the questions turned to the CX tools that Huw currently has at his disposal and the stages of installation and activation. At the moment it’s digital ticketing, a cloud telephony-based system, an improved customer contact centre and seamless experiences for customers between audio and visual, and presumbly a long wish list. Huw elaborated, “One of the biggest ones that’s going to be coming in this summer is digital ticketing. This is quite common, concert tickets have been e-tickets for a long time now. Football’s a little bit behind the curve there, although some clubs have got there. We’ll be releasing e-tickets as our single source of tickets going forwards. Now, that involves deploying a new app, making sure that all of our ticketing systems can talk to the app and all of our turnstiles can talk to the app, both on football match days, which is obviously the primary thing that everyone expects, but also for any other event days, for concerts that we host here. We need to make sure that whether it’s Ticketmaster or up the road locals, we can make sure we get the right people in the door. So that hopefully is going to be one of the great experience changes and also saves us printing off the best part of 20,000 tickets per match, which is great as well... Location-enabled tickets so your ticket’s not real until you turn up, all these sorts of things are great ways to make sure that they’re genuine.” Choosing a cloud telephony-based system Huw continues, “The decision to switch away was a no-brainer. We had a really old legacy on-prem system that still served our SDN and all sorts, so we had to get rid of that. We looked for a good cloud telephony-based system and one of our key requirements was the ability for our different teams to manage themselves. The self-service and manageability of the platform allowing everyone and their line managers to deal with their own requirements on an ad hoc basis was essential and that’s been proven so worthy as well. If we look at the last few months, we’ve had Take That, two nights sold out, and that sold out pretty quick. Obviously a Wembley final that we sold out for. That’s a lot of phone calls, there’s a lot of tickets being sold, there’s a lot of interaction with our fan experience staff. People asking
Jamie Snaddon Managing Director, EMEA
8x8.com
At the moment it’s digital ticketing, a cloud telephony- based system, an improved customer contact centre and seamless experiences for customers between audio and visual, and a long wish list.
Keepie Uppie Huw’s biggest challenge was time
management, with his view being, “the reality is that you can’t do everything, and you can’t do everything at once. You’ve got to prioritise what you need. And for me, having a really good team behind me is paramount. We’ve got a tremendous roadmap of work to do, both in and outside the stadium. All to give the fans the best experience they can when they come here. And then, obviously, everyone that comes here every day for other reasons.”
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