Southampton FC is based in Southampton, UK. Its operations are spread across two primary sites, the St. Mary’s Stadium and Staplewood training ground, where its commercial operations, shared services, charity, and player training are based. Each site has between 100 and 200 employees, and the rest are remotely located at other facilities or scattered across the globe.
The Challenge: On-premises systems failing to score
Southampton FC was using a legacy on-premises solution for its internal communications and contact center. The outdated system was difficult to use and a substantial drain on resources.
Because of the system’s architecture, almost all tasks had to be carried out by the IT team, including simple changes such as altering the open hours for their public numbers, adding new team members, or updating automated call messages.
In addition to taking IT resources away from strategic tasks, in some instances, it meant potentially temporarily taking everything offline too.
The system’s high cost was not justifiable given its functionality constraints. It could not support the club’s remote employees properly, and its limited capabilities led to less-than-ideal customer experiences.
“At peak times, like cup finals, we have thousands of customers trying to either buy tickets or get support. Our old system was not dynamic, so we couldn’t update the call queue message, for example, to let people know tickets were sold out or where they were in line,” commented Huw Fielding, Director of IT at Southampton FC. Adding, “Fans are much more than customers, so any negative customer experiences caused by the old system were felt much more deeply.”
The Solution: Giving on-prem the boot
Southampton FC knew it needed to change, but its leaders were not aware of the SaaS telephony options available. A UCaaS and CCaaS consultancy evaluated the market and presented several options to the club.
“After demoing 8x8 and seeing various use cases, 8x8 came out top of the league. It was an easy decision for us,” commented Huw.
“We could see that it had lots of features yet using it was simple. The consistent experience across the contact center and internal comms would make it easy for our staff to use. And it was clear to the IT team how it would alleviate the time-consuming and difficult-to-manage problems we had before,” Huw added.
The migration took two months, from November 2021 to January 2022. 8x8’s account and technical teams managed the process and helped with any challenges during the transition. The 8x8 team provided training on the new software, and 8x8 University also provided staff with self-led training resources.
“We didn’t want to just lift and shift our old system. We wanted to transform what we had, which is why we went with 8x8,” said Huw.
8x8 Work now connects all of Southampton FC’s employees across several sites, enabling remote working and international calls.
8x8 Contact Center has given new functionality to customer-facing teams, such as support service, ticket office, and corporate sales teams. For example, 8x8 Call Monitoring enables call recordings for quality control and training, while text-to-speech lets teams send various audio messages in real-time.
The Results: A change in tactics meets team goals
Southampton FC’s new 8x8 functionality has safely democratized the responsibilities that the old system had limited to IT experts. This has saved the club’s IT team substantial amounts of time administering the system and empowered different teams to make changes themselves.
“8x8’s greatest impact on our operations is certainly the speed and ease with which we can react to change. What used to take hours or more now takes seconds,” Huw explained. Adding, “the time and effort it takes to manage the system has effectively vanished too. 8x8 is almost self-managing because teams can manage things themselves.”
The feedback from the customer-facing CCaaS users has been positive. The Contact Center Analytics gives insight into customer sentiment and enhances quality control and training.
Southampton FC has reduced costs due to the more consistent, subscription-based model. It has a clear view of the amount it is spending on what, so it can align its needs with what’s being provisioned.