The last Dutch Grand Prix took place at Circuit Zandvoort in 1985. In the 36 years since, a lot has changed.
While the circuit has undergone massive renovations to make it suitable for modern race cars, the Dutch Grand Prix has undergone a major digital transformation to suit the customers of today as well.
CM.com helps businesses deliver superior customer experiences through conversational commerce and innovative customer journeys. Here’s how they did it for the Formula 1 Heineken Dutch Grand Prix set to be hosted at the CM.com Circuit Zandvoort.
To optimize the ticketing process of the Dutch Grand Prix, for the first time it set up pre-registration for tickets. This would be Max Verstrappen’s first home race, so pre-registration was essential as the demand was way more than the supply.
The Mobile Marketing Cloud, an omnichannel customer engagement solution built for B2C marketers, was set up. All the pre-registration data was safely stored in the Customer Data Platform (CDP) of the Mobile Marketing Cloud.
It’s common for tickets to get sold out and end up on the black market for double or triple the original price. This causes a lot of real fans to miss out on the action. To avoid this, the pre-registrations were filtered with several authentication steps to prevent fraudulent applications in the CDP. More than 11 per cent of the pre-registration requests were blocked because they were found to be fraudulent, giving more fans a chance to snag the tickets.
Since the Dutch Grand Prix used the CDP from the start, it held over ten million data points that are aggregated into over 300,000 customer profiles. But thanks to the extensive segmentation options, the organisers could design, analyse and automate highly personalised marketing emails to whichever segment of customers they wished to.
This also enabled them to send automatically triggered emails based on certain actions of fans or certain time frames. For example, an email was automatically sent when the pre-registration for tickets ended and when the ticket sales started.
To assist fans in every step of their journey, a chatbot called the Race Engineer for the Dutch Grand Prix was made specifically for the Dutch Grand Prix on WhatsApp. The Race Engineer has the ability to answer questions like:
- How can I reach the CM.com Circuit Zandvoort?
- What means of transportation is suggested?
- What is the fastest way out of the circuit?
On the day of the race, the chatbot could be used to answer frequently asked questions. If the bot could not answer a question, the Mobile Service Cloud made it possible to hand over the conversation to a human customer care agent.
The Mobile Service Cloud is a platform from which all conversations can be managed, allowing customer care agents to easily respond to all incoming messages and hand over conversations to the right teams without losing track of the conversation.
All conversations with the chatbot are automatically stored in the CDP, enabling marketers to easily segment customers by filtering on certain demographics or actions, like ‘everyone who started a conversation with the Race Engineer’.
The Dutch Grand Prix was to return in 2020, but had to be postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, thanks to the Mobile Marketing Cloud, the Dutch Grand Prix could communicate with the fans that had already bought tickets for the 2020 race easily.
With the customer data safely stored in the CDP, it became possible to organise the race keeping all the fans informed timely and in a personal way.
Check out how CM.com is transforming businesses with conversational commerce here.
