French author and intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre once said that “in football, everything is complicated by the presence of the opposite team.” While that’s a little bit true, in the case of Southampton FC, the real complications came from its legacy on-premises comms system.

Southampton’s system was slow to react and a drain on the club’s resources. When an opportunity to transfer came around, the club knew it was time. An agile new system was brought in that could provide top-tier customer experience (CX) and facilitate a transformation in day-to-day operations.

A historic club in need of change

Fans are much more than just customers. They are an essential part of a sports team; as essential as the players, the stadium, the staff or anyone else. And because of this, the customer experience between a team and the fans is more complicated. The highs are felt more strongly, and the negative lows are more painful. Fans feel they have a stake in their team.

The historic team Southampton FC knew this acutely. Founded in 1885, it has long had hundreds of thousands of dedicated fans and international acclaim as one of the oldest teams in football history.

The club’s operations, shared services, charity, and player training are spread across two primary sites, the St. Mary’s Stadium and Staplewood training ground, with around 250 employees, and there are many more located remotely at other academies and scouting the world for new talent.

Moving CX on from legacy systems

Although St. Mary’s presents the same quality today as it did when it was built in 2001, Southampton’s legacy on-premises comms system from the same time did not. It was difficult to use, a substantial drain on the club’s IT resources, and led to negative experiences for its fans due to its in-built constraints.

“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,” said 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.”

On top of this, the system was expensive and its lack of features and burden on the IT team meant it was even worse value for money.

Huw commented, “Our on-premises solution was a nightmare to use and manage, draining substantial amounts of our IT team’s time. It cost a fortune too. We knew we needed to change it, and when we saw what 8x8 was capable of we knew that we could transform our operations and customer experience for the better.”

“The 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 Fielding, Director of IT at Southampton FC

UCaaS and CCaaS are more than mid-season transfer

With new features and capabilities, a new comms system is more than replacing like-for-like. Migrating to a new system gives any organization an opportunity to transform its operations and make something better than it had before. Whether that is connecting with customers via social media channels, using data analytics to inform sales teams’ campaigns, or upskilling your workforce using quality control and training.

Southampton FC knew this, and 8x8’s mid-season transfer helped them to create something vastly better than they had before. “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.

It took two months for the club to fully transfer to 8x8 Work and 8x8 Contact Center as the work was carried out through the season. And with the change they were able to overhaul their operations.

Different departments now have control over their own systems, empowering them to make the changes they need. “The time and effort it takes to manage the system has effectively vanished too. It’s almost self-managing because teams can manage things themselves,” commented Huw.

This change has alleviated the burden on the club’s IT team and saved countless hours in the process. “The 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.

Southampton FC’s UCaaS and CCaaS success has been matched by their recent promotion from the Championship league to the Premiership, and 8x8 will be rooting for them throughout the new 2024-25 season.

From contact centers to cup winners and beyond

8x8 supports many sports teams and associations to achieve operational excellence alongside the excellence of their players. Through ongoing dedication to our platform and improving its abilities, we help teams to push their operations further, achieve more, and delight their fans. From baseball to hockey and beyond, you can learn about our work with other sports teams here.