WhatsApp for Sports Clubs: How Top Sports Clubs are using Chat Apps to deepen Fan Connections

What underpins any successful sports club is its fans: that ‘tribe’ of allegiance-sharing devotees who are 100 per cent committed to the team. Think of a sports club as a tightly knit family of professionals and fans, one where victories are celebrated and losses commiserated by everyone, and driven by a constant stream of opinions, news, and shared experiences.

It’s also the same dynamic that drives conversations on chat apps where friends, family, and colleagues meet up to celebrate life’s ‘wins’, commiserate when things go wrong, and talk about their daily lives. With so much in common, it perhaps shouldn’t come as a surprise that sports clubs are increasingly realizing chat apps’ potential to connect with and serve fans on platforms they already know, trust, and use every day.

This is especially true in the COVID-19 era, where tournaments are currently being held without spectators, meaning clubs must also find new ways to fire up fans’ passions for their favorite teams while social distancing policies remain in place — and just as importantly, offer more engaging and meaningful customer experiences once the pandemic is over.

Acting as information hubs, chat apps offer fans a more convenient, faster way to access key club services. Think membership applications, season tickets, game results, even updates on new signings, with both WhatsApp Business and Viber Business Messages able to deliver a diverse range of information as well as manage exchanges frictionlessly.

Less waste means bigger wins

Adopting a chat app-centric approach also helps reduce the cost and resource waste typically associated with inefficient customer services. It’s why the Dutch Premier Division soccer club, Vitesse Arnhem, turned to WhatsApp Business to deliver better outcomes for fans with ticket purchase queries.

Dogged by the relatively slowness of its existing email and phone services, the club turned to WhatsApp because of the messaging platform’s deep penetration in the Netherlands (according to Statista, the app is installed on 96% of all Dutch phones). Launched last year, the club’s WhatsApp-powered service enables fans to message about long-term subs and match tickets as well as request up-to-date news on club activities.

To manage the transition to WhatsApp successfully, the club only needed to train up four new customer service live agents to handle WhatsApp conversations, while a single community manager was drafted in to manage other customer service queries. Such a relatively small outlay garnered exceptional results with a 40% increase in first-contact resolution, an 80% decrease in average response times — and critically, a 10% increase in revenue.

Automate to innovate

Other clubs have replaced live agents with virtual assistants to answer typical FAQ-like questions posed by fans. For instance, Spanish football club, Atlético de Madrid, created an index of common customer queries accrued from its traditional comms channels including social media, telephone, and stadium office.

The club subsequently launched a virtual assistant on WhatsApp, able to respond to such queries in a conversational style using emojis, videos, photos, and more.

Better still, the assistant is multilingual, able to answer fans in both English and Spanish. The net result?

• 36% of traffic from customer conversations was redirected to the sales platform.
• 35% of customer interactions were handled outside of business hours.
• 46,000 messages were sent in response to fan queries within the first two months.