NBA Team Reboots Customer Engagement with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Upgrade, Data Management Refresh

The NBA's Oklahoma City Thunder have a reputation for fostering strong relationships with their fans - and for selling out games. When we last wrote about their successes in late 2014, the team had embraced a customer engagement philosophy that it supported with systems including Microsoft Dynamics CRM. The efforts yielded consistently high satisfaction metrics and helped them sell out home games all season long.

"They do things differently in Oklahoma City than in other cities like Miami or Philly or others," says the Thunder's VP of ticket sales, retention, and database operations Scott Loft. "Our [approach] is about having genuinely meaningful relationships with season ticket holders and fans. While we use technology to better understand our customers, that technology is not used in place of the relationship."

While the Thunder's relationship with fans has remained strong, Loft's team had noted ways that the current systems were starting to show limitations. Software was becoming outdated. Data was not flowing as well as it could. And as the team's performance varied over several seasons, Loft says they began to see areas in need of better data visibility to improve ticket sales and the fan experience.

And, that visibility must be granular, to the level of a group of similar fans or just one fan. When a marquee player like Kevin Durant is out with an injury for a prolonged period of time, as he was in the 2014-2015 season, the team watches for warning signs. For example, would people with lower priced season tickets started missing some of their games? And what about the fan ...