Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF), a 103-year-old football club in eastern Spain, has a dedicated and loyal fan base that spans generations. As an innovative and forward-thinking organization, the club is continuously improving the global fan experience and building new connections with the Valencia community. Using Microsoft Dynamics 365, the club gained new and actionable insights and a deeper understanding of its fans.
From deploying an app to speed food orders in the stadium to checking-in with 1,500 season ticket holders who missed in-person games during the COVID-19 lockdowns, Valencia has used the insights from its customer data to create delightful, rewarding, and engaging fan experiences.
Once you bring different types of data into the mix, you can understand more about people - Franco Segarra: Head of Innovation
Champions of tradition, culture, and local pride
Valencia Club de Fútbol (CF) is more than a football club. For its 50+ million fans around the world, the 103-year-old club is also emblematic of the heritage, spirit, and history of the Valencia region in eastern Spain. For generations, fans have demonstrated their loyalty by attending matches, supporting players, and wearing their Valencia jerseys with pride.
Franco Segarra, the head of innovation at Valencia CF, has been a season ticket holder since he was 12 years old. With a background in computer science and AI, Segarra brings a business mindset to his work while upholding the champions’ tradition and club culture as “the most important things” for the Valencia community. “With everything we do, we try to put the fan in the center of the equation,” says Segarra.
Enabling hyper-personalized, delightful experiences—at scale
With a six-person data engineering team, Valencia CF had already established a commitment to a data-centric approach but wanted to get to know and more deeply understand its fans. Valencia CF needed to find a way to harness the power of its existing tech stack and data sources—without having to completely overhaul its current system. The organization found a solution in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, which integrated easily with the club’s existing processes and allowed the organization to gain additional value from its previous technology investments.
Dynamics 365 enabled Valencia CF to use data from a wide array of separate sources - including sales spreadsheets, relational databases, attendance records, concession trends, and more—to build cohesive, 360-degree views of their fans.
By taking charge of their data, they were able to create more meaningful fan experiences - and to increase attendance numbers. “We were not seeing the full picture of the customer; we realized we knew very little about what happened in the process of buying a ticket, or selling a shirt,” says Segarra. In addition, match days are a cornerstone of the fan experience, so when COVID-19 led to a hiatus of in-person games, Valencia sought to leverage fan insights to stay connected with its community.
Segarra says the technology is also helping enrich invaluable aspects of Valencia CF culture, such as creating hyper-personalized experiences for its diverse, multi-generational fan base. With its new data analytics capabilities, Valencia CF set up a prediction algorithm to assess the probability of future game attendance for fans, based on previous behavior. As a result, Valencia CF was able to identify and connect with a segment of fans who were regular match attendees but had missed two consecutive games—an effort that was even more meaningful amidst the backdrop of a global pandemic. By sending a simple email to check in with those fans, Valencia was able to increase their match attendance by 20%.
In addition to the email outreach, 1,500 season ticket holders over age 70 in this segment received personal phone calls from the Valencia CF club. This included calls from Ricardo Arias and Miguel Tendillo, Valencia CF legends from the 80s and 90s. “Imagine getting a call from one of your favorite players saying, ‘Hey, is everything all right?’ That’s all possible because now we know more about the fans and their experience,” says Segarra.
Using data to solve problems for fans
Additional data analysis showed that match day ticket buyers made food and beverage purchases, but that season ticket holders rarely eat or drink during matches. The reason? The short, 15-minute break between halves wasn’t enough time to grab a drink or a snack without running the risk of missing game play.
In response, Valencia CF launched an app that allows fans to order food and drinks from their seats, reducing the amount of time spent queuing at the bars and food vendors. “That’s just one example of how we’re optimizing experiences with data, but it proved that once you bring different types of data into the mix, you can understand more about people,” says Segarra. The app meets a need for fans—and creates an opportunity for increased sales revenue at matches.
Leading an industry-wide culture shift
Valencia CF leverages its competitive outlook and underdog spirit to fuel a tech-centric innovation strategy. “We balance being bold with keeping the essence of tradition,” says Segarra. “I believe technology has a good side, and with everything we’ve figured out, there’s a human side.”
Utilizing Microsoft technologies has helped usher in a data-driven mindset across the organization. Decisions aren’t based on hunches or guesswork, but on strategy and evidence. This outlook has led to an increase in ticket sales, but more importantly, it’s created opportunities for more meaningful and personalized fan engagement. “Becoming data driven helps everyone get more out of their job,” Segarra explains.
The club has plans to experiment with more ways to reward and recognize fan loyalty, and to continue to seek new ways to serve the Valencia CF community. Being different is in Valencia’s DNA, and by taking a new approach to understanding its fans, the club can be bolder, and even more innovative—while still honoring the values and long-standing tradition of the club’s history. As a member of the Early Adopter Program for Copilot in Dynamics 365 Customer Insights, the Valencia team is looking forward to improving fan experiences even more by getting assistance with creating custom content using Copilot.
“Personalized content with the right tone is critical to delivering fan engagement – we are excited about how Copilot will help enable high impact content creation faster than ever before”, says Franco Segura. Adding that, “Copilot features in Customer Insights make me think I am a genius now”.
From creating content or journeys, to segmentation to gaining insights – Copilot enables our teams to deliver Fan experiences and business impact faster and easier. It’s going to be amazing to uplevel our work with Copilot. - Franco Segarra: Head of Innovation