Charlotte Hornets use Phizzle built on HANA to analyze fan behavior
The Charlotte Hornets of the NBA have millions of fans who know a lot about the team, but the team didn’t know much about its fans. To be more precise, the Hornets had a lot of data about its fans, but it was all disjointed and lacked cohesion.
To remedy that, Chris Zeppenfeld, the Hornets’ self-proclaimed “customer relationship management (CRM) and analytics czar,” implemented Phizzle FanTracker, a platform built on the SAP HANA database that combined millions of fan records to make one profile for each fan. The benefit of having an accurate and up-to-date profile of every fan is that the team can build a better relationship with its fans, which can lead to a better fan experience and more revenue for the team as improved marketing efforts lead to more sales.
The problem was not that the Hornets lacked data. In fact, they were drowning in it, thanks to the many ways modern fans can interact with a team — buying tickets over the internet, purchasing team gear in-store and online, eating and drinking at games, and talking about the team on social media. Every time a fan interacts with the team via one of these touchpoints, it creates a new bit of data about the fan. About four years ago, the Hornets CRM system began to strain at the seams to contain all this data. And even more troublesome for the Hornets, the data all lived in isolation. Zeppenfeld, whose actual title is director of business intelligence, understood that the team needed a data warehouse to handle the fan data even though this technology was relatively rare for sports organizations at the time. “We had basically maxed out our CRM, [Microsoft Dynamics], because we were trying to shove so many sources of data into it.
People can touch our Hornets brand in many ways and a lot of those have different data sources,” Zeppenfeld said. “So we knew we’d have to get a data warehouse, and I saw it as two different challenges. One is we have about 12 to 14 different data sources from about 12 different vendors that would need to go in this data warehouse.
The second one is, once you’ve done all that, now you have 12 fan profiles in the data warehouse, how do you get this down to one?” Eighth year with Charlotte Hornets/Hornets Sports & Entertainment as senior director of business intelligence, where he’s responsible for analytics, CRM, data warehouse, surveys, ticket pricing, email marketing and revenue strategy. Prior to Hornets Sports & Entertainment, worked four years at TeamWork Online as well as online sports executive recruiting firm as senior manager of client services. Born and raised in Pittsburgh, now lives in Charlotte, N.C. Usually spends weekend mornings yelling irrational things at the TV during his beloved Arsenal games.
Getting 12 down to 1 Zeppenfeld found the answer to both these questions with Phizzle FanTracker, an application built on the in-memory SAP HANA database that provides a data warehouse and the ability to go through all the millions of fan profiles and eliminate duplicate data to end up with one fan profile.
Phizzle also has tools for things like social media listening and website tracking that further help analyze fan behavior. “We went with the Phizzle FanTracker platform because we felt that [it was] going to do the best job of helping to get those 12 profiles down to one,” Zeppenfeld explained. “If I go to our store, I might be ‘Chris Zeppenfeld’ in the retailing data, but I might be ‘Christopher Zeppenfeld’ in the ticketing data, and I might be ‘czeppenfield@gmail.com’ in the social media listening database.
