Bankwest Stadium launches Score app and customer loyalty initiative

Bankwest Stadium has launched a new customer incentives and rewards program, Bankwest Stadium Score, a platform it says will provide insights and improve the experience of sports fans at the stadium.

The customer loyalty initiative is oriented around a free app, available the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, giving fans stadium information along with details on upcoming events, maps, food and beverage details and FAQs. The app is also the gateway to the Bankwest Stadium Score rewards platform.

Bankwest Stadium CEO, Daryl Kerry, said this innovation will build on the company’s existing fan experience.

“Bankwest Stadium was built for the fans and the app and rewards program are the next steps in delivering an unparalleled event experience,” he said. “Bankwest Stadium Score will encourage fans to keep coming back by offering up rewards the more they use it at the Stadium.”

Users are incentivised to use the app for exclusive food and beverage offers, competitions and promotions, priority ticket access, rewards for attending events and prizes. A unique digital barcode is generated when someone signs up that can be scanned at any point-of-sale in the venue with rewards and entries for prizes each time it’s used.

Bankwest Stadium general manager digital and technology, Daniel Farrar, told CMO it didn’t want to create just a stock-standard app.

“So we started from the ground up. We have all the necessary venue information, tickets, how to get there; but we wanted to take it a bit further and to give users very good reasons to really engage at the customer level," he said. "We wanted consumers to be interacting with us when they’re at the venue to help us to understand their behaviour.

"Traditionally, this hasn’t been done at a really sophisticated digital level and that’s what we’re doing. We want to understand what customers are doing at the venue and to tailor their experiences to them at the venue based on this."

In terms of the broader marketing plan, Bankwest Stadium, home to popular sports teams across a range of codes including the Parramatta Eels, Wests Tigers and Western Sydney Wanderers, is aiming to gather rich insights to enhance the user experience of fans who come to the new state-of-the-art venue.

“We want to ensure we’re providing people with the best experience, responding to feedback of people coming through the door, enhance the venue over time. Our job is to better understand the people who come to the venue and provide them an experience they want to receive,” Farrar said.

Bankwest Stadium, through its research into pain points, looks at what it can - and realistically can’t - improve about the stadium experience, he continued. “We obviously can’t control the performance of your team, or the weather. But food and beverage is one area where we get feedback and we can develop these offerings.”

Harnessing real information about people’s behaviour at the venue, at a customer level, and utilising those analytics is the starting point. The stadium will continue to look at ways to streamline the customer journey, where it’s feasible, by scaling the app to include more services.

“This is phase one. What we’re investigating is potentially an extension of that food and beverage offering and maybe looking at mobile ordering as one possibility. We have to work through the logistics, but we’ve built the starting point with the rewards platform,” Farrar said.

On the development whiteboard is the broader discussion around streamlining, as far as practical, the customer journey, although Farrar agreed it involved a lot of moving parts. Ticket purchase, planning transport ticketing, digital activation and ordering within the app are on the wish list for the 'ideal world' scenario. Working with some of Bankwest Stadium's range of partners, could further improve many elements of the customer experience.

“We’ve tried to build a scalable engine room [the Score platform] that can help deliver on that when we get to that point,” Farrar added.

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