Data Analytics: A Home Run For Creating Fan Loyalty
I’m an engineer by training. A numbers guy. A data geek. I spend my time talking with engineers and businesspeople about systems architecture, ROI, cloud computing, microservices, market share, and finance. I also think a lot about love. Hear me out.
My business, Major League Baseball, (MLB), is ultimately all about the fans, and their relationship with the great game of baseball. We want to thrill them. We want to delight them. We want to give them ways to experience the sport that, just a few years ago, no one thought possible. We want their loyalty—a kind of love, in and of itself. In a world full of alternatives, we want to use technology to earn our fans’ loyalty more effectively than ever.
You likely have the same desire, no matter your industry or line of work. Not only is customer loyalty and satisfaction the anchor of your business, but it can also drive much of your information technology strategy. We IT people love our technology, but as members of a business we should never lose sight of the fact that people use technology to have experiences. Those experiences can be profoundly emotional, and it’s the emotional ones that usually earn loyalty.
Cloud computing and data analytics, two of the most important subjects for today’s enterprise computing, enable impressive new ways to win and grow loyalty. It’s time to think about how.
For the past several years, MLB worked to consolidate its teams, network topologies, and legacy infrastructures of on-prem, cloud, and hybrid systems into a single unified system. Recently we have been doing this usingAnthos, Google Cloud’s app modernization platform, which affords a single view and interoperability across all those assets.
As CTO of a sports league, it’s essential to translate technology deployments into practical business value, and the simplicity and efficiency of Anthos is straightforward. The real business goal—building loyalty and gaining growth—comes from new and better uses of data, now that we can see it all in one place.
By moving toGoogle Cloudfrom another well-known cloud provider, we made a bet on Google’s leadership in machine learning and media technologies. We are now set up to really leverage the data we’re already collecting, and find new ways to serve, delight and engage our fans. For example, people watching games remotely can still participate via a simple app where they enter cheers or boos, which we then utilize in real time to adjust the crowd noise in the ballpark. From that, we’ve gathered more than 71 million “engagements”—a big signal about the desire for fans to participate, and a potential predictor of customer loyalty. Technology from Google Cloud empowers us to take that information and use it in future personalization strategies that put the fan in control.
Looking ahead, one of the things we’re planning includes video tracking of the entire field of play.
