4 Things Retailers Can Learn From the Sports Industry’s Customer Engagement Experiences

Following months of decline, U.S. retail sales jumped 3 percent in January 2023. Despite this growth, things won’t come easy for retail brands that have struggled over the past few years. Rising prices tied to inflation and the seemingly endless promise of recession threaten to impede sustainable and predictable growth. This means retailers need to adapt to changing customer expectations more than ever before, begging the question: How can retailers further meaningfully engage with an evolving consumer base in an uncertain market outlook? An industry to look toward that has been successfully creating engaging experiences for its customers is an unexpected one: sports.

Sports teams, leagues and venues have taken advantage of the capabilities of intelligent chat to fuel engagement and build long-lasting relationships with fans. While many retailers are familiar with chat for transactional customer service requests and other basic functions, they could take a page out of the sports playbook to build on existing customer experience (CX) technology and augment their acquisition and retention strategies.

Here are four areas where the sports industry can help fuel retail CX:

1. Scaling Automated Interactions

Many retailers already use chat in its simplest forms, either enabling customers to connect to human agents or directing customers to one-size-fits-all knowledge repositories. Retailers may look to innovative sports brands that have evolved their use of intelligent chat into domains like lead qualification, merchandise or ticketing recommendations, and growing the precision of responses to FAQs. According to GameOn data, enhancing the scope of chat-based automation has resulted in instant resolutions of up to 95 percent of fan inquiries currently dedicated to human-agent interactions for leading sports clubs and leagues.

By automating more and more complex interactions in addition to simple transactional ones, businesses can improve their responsiveness and provide better customer service, while preserving precious live-agent availability for the most nuanced customer scenarios.

2. Consolidated 24/7 Access

Expanding automation has unlocked around-the-clock engagement for sports fans. The upside for retail is even bigger: by “upskilling” chat-based automation into the product discovery and browsing phases of the user journey, retailers are able to cultivate virtual concierge shopping services for prospective and returning customers 24/7, paving the way for scalable revenue growth that occurs beyond the hours of human agent availability.

Furthermore, automation strategies that combine the entire sports fan journey into one location, whether web, mobile app, or personal or social messaging platforms, have produced a consolidation effect. The ability to request news, stats, highlights, tickets and merchandise in one place significantly reduces friction within the fan journey. Retailers have equal if not greater opportunities to reduce friction in their CX. Brands that can offer shoppers live fashion show broadcasts, new arrival drops, in-depth product browsing, and shipping and return policies in the same communication channel will experience less funnel attrition due to CX friction, enabling both top- and bottom-line growth.

3. Increased Personalization

The sports industry has embraced intelligent CX to engage with fans beyond the game. Intelligent chat functions can engage with a fan's browsing history to suggest other upcoming games or team merchandise of interest. Knowing a fan’s favorite player or team and providing such customized and personalized news and updates makes the fan feel more connected to their team and creates a deeper sense of loyalty.

Retailers can use these CX strategies to engage with customers in a similar way. A shopper who has a “playlist” of her favorite styles and products delivered to her own personal or social messaging channels is substantially easier to acquire and retain than traditional paid media or cookie-based retargeting campaigns.

4. Conversational Data is Better Data

Within sports industry innovators, intelligent chat has been deployed in personal messaging platforms like Meta’s Messenger app to provide such whole-fan-journey experiences mentioned above. The conversational commentary collected over a fan life cycle during a game or season provides sentiment analysis that's deeper than almost all other digital engagement campaigns.

Fans of tonight’s losing team are traditionally not expected to click a “buy tickets” link in the aftermath. Yet my hometown Detroit Pistons know from my interactions with its consolidated 24/7 chat platform that I care much more about the performance of our promising rookies this season than any team — win or loss, owing to my player-specific highlight requests and player-specific conversational commentary during and after games. I can now be segmented into a new fan cohort — for instance “Rookie Fanatics” — which the Pistons can confidently market to, independent of recent team performance.

Retailers can similarly harness the advanced nature of conversational data. The ability of a brand like Gucci to capture conversational sentiments in intelligent chat like “I love when Adele performs in one of her black outfits!” meaningfully creates new, marketable segments tied to a specific permutation of “celebrity ambassador x color palette x occasion,” rather than assessing product-only interest through click-based campaigns. Conversational data provides deeper sentiment analysis and segmentation, which in turn stimulates growth in acquisition, conversion and retention.

Retailers facing rapidly evolving consumer behavior can benefit greatly from their counterparts in the sports world, where the common thread of intelligent chat can create new, meaningful relationships between brand and consumer that can grow acquisition, retention and profitability at scale during these uncertain economic conditions.

Richard Cheng is the president of GameOn Technology, the industry-leading intelligent chat platform that powers authentic conversational experiences for some of the world's largest and most popular brands, teams and content properties.