Founded in 1882 Tottenham Hotspur Football club has more than 300 million fans around the world, but had no unified view of their digital fan profile. The club began using Salesforce CRM to consolidate the fan data, and has now implemented Service Cloud and Agentforce to improve customer service and to run its stadium and retail operations.
According to Rob Pickering, Chief IT and Digital Officer, Tottenham Hotspur Football Club:
Over the last 18 months we've gone on a major journey from a digital transformation perspective, and this has really been about continuing to bring the fan to the forefront of the experience.
When you look at our incredible global fan base Tottenham has, it is very engaged with the club, and it's a privilege to work with them. We have the world's best fans, and I want to make sure they have the world's best experiences. To do that, we needed to make sure we had enough data to be able to service them with what they need, when they need, and where they need it.”
The club has worked with Salesforce to bring that data into a single customer - or fan - record, which allows it to see every interaction that a fan has with the club in one place, whether it be match tickets, retail or ecommerce sales, or information about players. Ouckerng explains:
Those fans are the same people. The same fan that buys a team shirt is the same fan that comes to a game. Is the same fan that attends one of our third-party attractions on site, like F1 Drive. Historically that was all dis-connected. They looked like eight or 10 different fans. We couldn't service them effectively in terms of knowing who they were and what they might be interested in.”
On top of the data foundation the club has been putting digital experiences at the edge of it. As fans engage with the club, regardless of the channel, both in person and online, it uses Agentforce to deliver an AI powered better service to its fans. Says Pickering:
We have the Ask Spurs bot, which sits on our website and our app, and works in around 11 languages, 24/7. It unlocks the ability for us to service fans wherever they are. Traditionally a bot has been for questions and answers, and that's helpful. But because we've now got that data rooted into Salesforce and all the guardrails and trust are in place around that, it allows us to be able to start to take a more proactive approach.”
Resilient
Resilience and safety are at the core of fan experiences, according to Pickering, who argues that Agentforce guardrails have enabled the club to be very confident about security:
We built it in a way that's safe because this is a problem that I have to worry about every day. If we were to have an issue, any issue, that becomes both a front page and a backpage news story quite quickly.
He is confident about the security of the system because the data is sitting inside trusted boundaries, secured with Salesforce:
The work we've been doing over the last 18 months has been about connecting all of our systems together. We had about 35 disparate systems doing every part of the fan journey. So we centralized them in Salesforce. We also had to make sure we had identity across all of our touch points.
So when you log into our customer retail store, our e-commerce store, you log in with the same ID that you log into your ticketing account, the same as you log in your membership account, which is the same as you log in your F1 drive account, and so we had to bring all of that data together, and that's allowed us to move quite quickly.”
Using Salesforce also means the club, with its global fan base, doesn't have to worry about the different data protection and legal requirements from separate geographical regions. Pickering comments:
Because Salesforce is a global company, local protection requirements are built into the platform, and that's been really helpful for us. We don't have to think about how we deal with five different regulatory regimes or 50 different regulatory regimes. We've got a platform that meets that high water mark.
Second half
The club will continue to focus on ensuring its fans and employees can keep that secure environment, no matter where in the world they are, according to Pickering:
I've been really heartened to see that global fan base, and the way we reach into those fans and service them is a core part of the platforms that we're building. We want to make it as easy for them to be fans of the club as it possibly can be. and that's been the focus of all of everything.
The next stage for the club will be a fan engagement agent, where fans will be able to get club and player information, like how many goals a player scored, and be shown videos of the goals, after which the club will be able to offer the players shirts to purchase. The engagement agent will also help from a match day perspective, as the club wants to expand it to the 3000 staff that work on match days, says Pickering:
Not all of the stadium staff can know everything about every policy and how things work. So as we expand the usage of this, not just externally to our fans, but internally to our employees, they'll be able to answer questions from fans that they might not have known an answer to.
Pickering concludes:
Whether it's the new digital assets we built, whether it's our CRMs and supporting Clouds, whether it's what we're doing around identity, all of that has been focused on how we make sure that no matter where our fans are, they have the best possible engagement with the club.