How Chelsea Football Club uses a CDP to personalize the fan experience

The customer data platform (CDP) is not new to CX. In fact, CDPs have become increasingly important to CX since they first emerged a little over 10 years ago. What has changed is that over this time, many other new channels have also emerged, making CDPS much more powerful.

This isn’t just true to the customer experience. At the UK’s Chelsea Football Club, the CDP is also enhancing the fan experience across digital and app-based interactions.

Personalizing 615 million experiences

From Ruud Gullit and Didier Drogba to Sam Kerr and Millie Bright, some of the world’s biggest names have played for Chelsea; it’s just part of why the club counts 615 million fans around the world. However, it isn’t feasible to meet the needs of 615 million people with a one-size-fits-all experience and, with personalized experiences now expected as standard, the 120-year-old club needed to up its game.

Chelsea has now deployed Twilio Segment to gain deeper insights into its entire fan base and better meet the needs of fans with additional content on players, promotions and practical information for those who are able to attend games at a stadium.

The club’s chief digital officer, Phil Lynch, says: “For many fans, regardless of their geographical location, digital connectivity is what brings them closer to the club, our players and our history. Twilio's leading work in customer engagement will help enrich these fan experiences and offer an increased level of personalization and connection to the club for our global fan base.”

Twilio’s CDP allows Chelsea to analyze each fan’s interactions with the club and then utilize that fan data to personalize experiences, creating a positive feedback loop that is intended to foster deeper engagement and more innovative experience features. These include updates on matches and ticket availability and tailored web and app experiences.

In time, Chelsea will be able to reward fans for their engagement by offering promotions when they enter the stadium, personalizing the content they see with their favorite Chelsea player, and highlighting the areas of the stadium that are best for half-time refreshments.

Tapping the digital value of sports fans

Although fans are in it for the game, content generation is a significant value generator for clubs and teams in all sports – and also a key part of the extended fan experience. A 2024 report from Horizm states that American leagues, led by the NFL and NBA, are the most successful in generating value from their follower bases. This is driven by high levels of content generation and geographic distribution of their followers, who are predominantly located in the US, where metrics such as cost per mile (CPMs) are higher.

Here is Horizm’s calculation for how this breaks down as value per fan:

The report also states that globally, the top 25 teams across all sports have 2.6 billion followers – which represents more than 50 percent of overall followers of the top 25 leagues – with the top 10 biggest teams representing almost two billion followers.
While team loyalty is obviously a huge driver of this, so too is the celebrity of the biggest players. Athletes are major influencers on social media with the likes of Cristiano Ronaldo and Messi in the top three in the world in terms of followers.

In short, the fan experience is big business.

Referencing the Chelsea partnership, Peter Bell, VP of marketing, EMEA at Twilio, says: “Our exciting new partnership will empower Chelsea Football Club to connect with their fans, enabling powerful, personalized engagement both home and away. At Twilio, we’re committed to supporting Chelsea in allowing its fans to feel even closer to the club. We’re excited to see the game-changing impact of this partnership over the coming years."

How apps enhance the fan experience

One of the most rapidly developing channels is the app. Used by thousands of brands as a convenient and mobile-first means by which customers can shop, track, communicate and engage, apps offer an unrivalled level of flexibility, reach and opportunity.

Chelsea’s app, The fifth stand, is a source of club news, interviews, match updates and game analytics, and also carries live commentary for every Premier League match. Across the sporting world, apps are playing an increasingly important role in fan engagement and overall experience.

The digital and app experience provided by the Augusta National Golf Club for the Masters golf tournament is no exception. With 40,000 spectators permitted to attend the tournament each day – and mobile phones banned from the property – the app is utilized to reach a global audience of millions. Not only do golf fans get to watch the tournament, as of 2024 they also enjoyed stats and projections about every shot from every player on every hole, as well as expanded AI-generated narration on more than 20,000 highlight clips.

For more than 25 years, the Masters’ data, applications and workloads across on-premises servers and multiple clouds have been managed by IBM. For the 2024 tournament, the entire AI lifecycle was managed on the AI and data platform, IBM watsonx™. This allowed the Masters to scale analytics and AI wherever its data resided – and without unification – through open formats and integration with existing databases and tools.

The Masters used watsonx.data to organize and structure data relating to the tournament, such as the course, round and holes completed, which could then be populated with live data as the tournament progressed. “We also have player elements, ball tracking information and scoring,” says Aaron Baughman, IBM Fellow and AI and hybrid cloud lead. “Being able to organize the data around that structure helps us to efficiently query, retrieve and use the information downstream, for example for AI narration.”

Quick links

• 5 Touchdowns: How the NFL is winning over fans
• How the Minnesota Twins changed fan experiences forever
• The Australian Open is transforming fan experiences with generative AI
  
  

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