How to turn matchday staff into club ambassadors - Insights from our webinar
Although financial and practical reasons seem the main reasons to hold off such a project with our clubs, Raj feels those challenge are easily and fastly compensated with the overal gains of having your matchday staff acting as true club ambassadors. Three important guidelines were handed out to start off an excellent service programme.
1) Develop a clear programme to be executed by a carefully selected staff
One of the most important learnings was that there can be no misunderstanding regarding the goal and intention of the programme. Every matchday staff member receives an elaborate service training at Fiserv Forum, and the values are being repeated numerously. Furthermore, they targetted the recruitment selection to persons with a daytime, service-oriented job such as teachers, airline workers and hosts at restaurants. As there is a war for talent in venues, they have made the rewards quickly accessible and of escalating quality to convince the desired matchday staff members.
2) The devil is in the detail - wording is essential
How you speak to fans on matchday is of vital importance to their experience. Therefore, wording is key in the service programme of Fiserv Forum. They have selected and included keywords in the training to use in interaction with the visitors. For instance, a thank you is never answered with the standard "no problem", but with "with our pleasure" to indicate the willingness to help. It's the small things that help in building the desired perception.
3) The STAGE service programme makes staff go the extra mile
The STAGE programme is focused on delivering the friendliest staff in the stadium business. In order to do that, rewards are being handed out quickly and can be saved for prices of escalating quality. The majority of the chosen prices are experiences, like a photo of the staff member on the court. You can earn a point by being kind like extensively helping a (disabled) fan, by being evaluated excellent by secret shoppers or, by good performance reviews of the supervisor or peers. There are several ways to gather tokens to trade in for an experience. The employee of the year even gets to travel with the players to an away game.
Curious to find out more? You can find the recorded version of the complete webinar on our ESSMA Knowledge Platform
Next webinar topic: the impact of hospitality segmentation on stadium development
LIverpool FC and Everton FC will enlighten us on the impact they created with their new hospitality package and associated segmentation. Do they manage to attract new spectators and are they from the desired target audience? Did the new hospitality package increase turnover? And what is so special about those packages? Join us and find out for yourselves!