With fans and employees around the world, going digital with SAP was a no-brainer for FC Bayern – one of the “beautiful game’s” biggest and most successful football clubs.
“We are a local club in Bavaria, but have fans around the globe,” says Stefan Meri, the club’s director for digital media and communications. In addition to its 1,200 employees in Munich, New York, Shanghai, and Bangkok, the club has around 175 million followers on its social media and its own media platforms.
Meri says the club’s digital and media platforms are very important because fans expect to be able to interact with their club wherever they are. “They want to send us their feedback and they want to receive feedback.”
Fans Are Everything
The fans are at the center of everything FC Bayern does, Meri confirms: “Our aim is to optimize all the processes for them, so they have the best user experience. Technology helps us with personalization, with the sales processes, with content — with everything.”
He says the club chose SAP as its technology partner for several reasons, including the fact that FC Bayern has different businesses. “We have ticketing, we have merchandising, we have fan experience, we have digital platforms, and SAP is able to deliver the best solutions for all these areas.”
He also cites SAP’s commitment to continuously develop its cloud-based platforms and says this makes the digital experience “better and better every day.”
The club uses the SAP Emarsys Customer Engagement solution to capture fan data and create newsletters and personalized content for them, and the SAP Customer Checkout application for point-of-sale management and real-time sales and stock updates.
“We have around 50,000 transactions every match day in the Allianz Arena, and we use SAP Customer Checkout for that,” Meri explains. “Fans can buy their merchandise articles, they can buy food or beverages, they can walk into our restaurants and pay there with SAP Customer Checkout.”
Separately, SAP Event Ticketing software handles ticketing at FC Bayern; not just for football fans, but also for its basketball team and museum. The club also uses SAP tools for its employees. For example, the AI-infused SAP SuccessFactors HCM suite gives employees and managers access to an expanding array of human capital management tools.
Personalization
Looking ahead, Meri says he believes personalization will become even more important.
“We want to become better and better and better with personalization. We want to be able to really contact the people one by one, and not to speak about target groups in the future. We want to interact in a truly personal way with the fans.”
He believes that embedding artificial intelligence capabilities in SAP solutions will help achieve this aim and that overall, AI will help FC Bayern become more efficient, lower costs, and meet the expectations of the fans.
“Our biggest aim for the future on the horizon of FC Bayern is to meet every single expectation of any single fan around the globe, be it in Tokyo, be it in Rio de Janeiro, or be it in Munich,” he says. “We want to meet the expectations of the fans, and this expectation should be met in real time. This is our big aim for the future.”
Lessons Learned at FC Bayern
If other organizations want to learn from FC Bayern, Meri says one lesson is that with a good technology partner like SAP, even midsize companies with broad business activities like FC Bayern can cover all the bases and be able to be competitive.
“I think what we are good at is meeting fan expectations via digital platforms,” he says. For that, interactive communication is very important. “You always have to take into account what the fans, other organizations, and customers really expect and want from you. You have to be able to deliver that via digital platforms.”