NEW YORK — Alexa: May I have another beer?
Imagine a future in-arena suite experience where Alexa by Amazon, through the Echo smart speaker, could take your beer or food order, communicate it to the kitchen staff and have it delivered to your seat within minutes.
You wouldn’t have to open your phone and click through an app for mobile ordering (though you could do that too), wave down the waitstaff, or shlep to a brick-and-mortar concession stand. All you’d have to do is tell Alexa what you want.
As part of an effort to reach fans where they are in sports arenas and make it easier-than-ever for them to order concessions and merchandise during games, Oracle Hospitality is experimenting with ways Alexa might be able to integrate with arenas’ point-of-sale (POS) systems.
“Telling Alexa to send another tray of nachos, send another case of beer to your suite, those are the sorts of things that we’re looking to enable because those are things that people use in their daily life already,” Phil Ross, a senior sales engineer at Oracle, said last week at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry event at Barclays Center. “Buying food and beverage is an impulse buy. Whenever they’re ready, we want to be right there ready to transact.”
The Alexa experiment is among the many ways Oracle Hospitality is looking to integrate its cloud-based Simphony POS software with existing technologies that fans are already familiar with, such as the Echo, self-serve kiosks, conventional brick-and-mortar stations and branded mobile ordering apps.
This initiative stems from a recent study of sports fans conducted by Oracle, which found that 45 percent of fans have abandoned a concession line at least once in the past 12 months without making a food or beverage purchase.
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It’s easy to see why people might find a reason to step out of line, such as growing impatient if it’s too long or slow-moving as the game is resuming. Oracle is looking to tackle issues such as those by making it easy for fans to order from wherever they are with whatever technology they choose to use.
As part of the Oracle survey, 56 percent of fans said they would be willing to use a mobile app to place an order and pick up concessions from an express line. Ross said he expects that to grow as venues connect their POS systems with mobile apps so that all systems are tied together and living in a single ecosystem.
Sports franchises, ever on the hunt for more data and ways to drive revenue, are investing in mobile apps that keep fans engaged during and after games. Some of these apps have enabled mobile ticketing and in-arena purchases, which have allowed them to target fans with promotions and enhance loyalty programs.
Oracle hopes that by pulling all of these technologies together in one place, it’ll be able to help teams improve the experience with one seamless fan-facing application while simultaneously making it easier for franchises to manage the back-end technologies guiding operations through a single platform.
“It’s basically like a bunch of small businesses running under one roof,” Ross said. “We want to be providing one platform that supports all of those different areas even though the ecosystem as a bunch of different types of operations in the venue.”
The Mobile Arena
By creating opportunities for fans to engage with a single platform or app, teams will be able to gather data about their fans and leverage their order history and activity to target promotions and ads for things such as concessions, merchandise and tickets.
Arena operators have been gathering data about fans based off ticketing purchases for years. Randy Lewis, VP of business strategy and analytics at Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, said ticketing data is among “the most valuable data” that Barlcays Center gets.
Figuring out who bought the ticket is the easy part, however. Finding out who is actually in attendance, and predicting where and how they want to spend their money, is a whole other problem that in-arena technologies are itching to solve.
“One of the things that keeps me and my counterparts in similar roles at other venues up at night is who is physically in the building,” Lewis said. “I know a lot of information about who’s purchasing the ticket, but I don’t know those other two individuals who are accompanying that purchaser to the building. I think in three years, every venue is going to go completely mobile as far as ticketing and from there it becomes very easy to associate every subsequent transaction and behavior with the actual individual.”
GAME DAY! The #OracleHospCommunity have arrived in #NewYork for the State of the Industry conference at @barclayscenter. We’re excited to host the day alongside @SportTechie and also for the @NYIslanders hockey game in the evening courtesy of #SportTechie
#Isles pic.twitter.com/dz2uqO0ZKJ
— Oracle Hospitality (@OracleHosp) February 13, 2018
Tying mobile ticketing with POS information would enable arenas to figure out things that were previously difficult to predict, such as how long fans are in the stadium and what they’ve bought in the past so that venues can better predict subsequent purchases and target ads in the future.
“Past behavior is the best indicator for what future behavior might be,” said Ed Rothenberg, head of business development at Oracle Hospitality.
That same technology will enable venues to build upon their loyalty programs. By opting in to these mobile apps, fans are willingly trading some of their personal data for convenience. In return, stadiums can leverage a treasure trove of data to improve in-arena operations and drive sales.
Oracle, through its suite of cloud-based hospitality products, is building a web to connect all of these fragmented parts together, which can be adapted to meet the changing technological tastes of consumers.
Perhaps Oracle is betting on a future in which it’s commonplace to order beer through casual conversation with an artificial intelligence. And perhaps that’ll be one component of many that alleviate lines in arenas.