Last week, social media platform TikTok announced a short-term pilot program, called TikTok Resumes, where users create a video resume, post it, and then send that video to recruiters through the app. More than 30 companies including Chipotle, Target, and Shopify signed up to accept resumes for the pilot, which will last until July 31. 

Here are two reasons why we love this program as the future of recruiting:

1. A New Future for Recruiting?- Whether this TikTok pilot program turns into a full-time service offering or some other platform emerges to fill the gap, clearly the standard recruiting process is somewhat broken, especially for entry level and creative jobs. Does a cover letter truly express a candidate’s abilities or only give evidence a person can copy a template from google and tweak it appropriately? You can’t fake a three minute video but you can let your personality shine through and show why you are deeply passionate about a company and its mission. 
2. Meet Your Candidate Pool Where They Are – If people are already spending their time creating content for the TikTok, why not eliminate frictions and allow them to easily apply for a job with your company through the social network? There’s a good chance that as an employer you can reach a wider audience than simply posting on a job board. In my opinion, this makes so much sense for roles like the Detroit Pistons’ video producer where a candidate’s video can quickly highlight the relevant skill set. 

Time will tell whether video resumes begin widely replacing paper resumes and cover letters for recruiters but I’m bullish that this TikTok pilot represents the start to a changing of the guard. Worst case scenario, I have to imagine evaluating candidates will be way more entertaining.

From conversations with multiple organizations, hiring has been challenging coming out of the pandemic, specifically for gameday staff with the season around the corner. Could this pilot program inspire you to change your HR process and attract younger, more digitally native employers? 

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At EngageMint, we’re huge proponents of surveying your customers to discover insights and drive innovation. If it was up to us, every athletic department would have a customer insights program that calls upon its most passionate fans to share their voices and opinions like Penn State.

That’s why we love what FIFA, the international governing body for soccer (football to the rest of the world), is doing with its Fan Experience Panel. A group of 25 football fans from across the globe were handpicked to be continuously consulted on various ways to enhance the experience on and off the field. Panel members represent 6 continents and 17 countries, coming from a variety of backgrounds to bring diverse experiences, views and ideas.

Here’s three takeaways when considering using customer feedback to source ideas from outside your department :

1. Create a collaborative dialogue – FIFA’s program isn’t simply collecting a bunch of user feedback a la Amazon Reviews. Rather, fans participate in a series of workshops and provide direct input over time. Giving fans the opportunity to watch how their feedback is being applied creates more skin in the game which will ultimately lead to more collaboration and an on-going dialogue. 
2. Make diversity a priority – Academic research shows that organizations with higher diversity of thoughts and opinions are more likely to succeed over homogenous organizations. FIFA easily could have roped together 25 fans from a few countries in Europe and called it a representative population but the decision to select fans from 6 continents and 17 countries shows FIFA values a wide-range of opinions and backgrounds. That’s the best way to ensure no stone gets left unturned. 
3. Unearth the passion – The 25 fans selected had already been a part of the FIFA Fan Movement, a community with open lines of communication to the FIFA board. These fans live and breathe soccer and were willing to complete an application to become involved. College athletics fans have the same elevated passion and thus, your organization can easily tap into this network of hungry individuals looking to improve their experience.

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In a recent podcast episode with Rachel Jacobson, President of the Drone Racing League, we asked Rachel about the best investment they’ve made as an organization over the last twelve months. 

“Definitely on research. We’ve invested to learn more about our fans and we’re now a data and insights-driven organization.” 

Rachel Jacobson, from Flip the Switch podcast Episode 65

Understanding what makes up the core DNA of their fans, their goals, motivations, emotions, and stereotypes, has allowed Drone Racing League to grow rapidly over the past year.

Does your organization truly know who makes up its fan base? Have you identified your current fan segments and aspirational target audiences (deeper than just age ranges and ticket-buying history)? What are the non-athletics-related activities they love?  What has changed for them in the course of the last year?

When we build out customer personas for our clients, before we begin customer journey mapping, these are some of the first questions we look to answer.  

Customer service is NOT customer experience. And vice versa. We’ve written about this before, but I was reminded of the difference between the two in a conversation last week.

Customer service tends to focus on behaviors and problem resolution. Customer experience digs much deeper into the processes and tangible items guests can see, hear, smell and feel.

• Customer service is your ticket takers greeting fans as they walk into the stadium.
• Customer experience is the process for fans to open their mobile tickets on their app.
• Customer service is making sure you repair the relationship with a fan when they call in upset about the new parking policy. 
• Customer experience is constantly assessing the parking policies to make them as hassle-free as possible. 

While both customer experience and customer service seek to deepen emotional connection with your tribe, customer experience tends to be more proactive while customer service tends to be more reactive. Customer service is an extremely important part of the overarching customer experience, but it’s still just one part of many.

While one person may own customer service in your organization, customer experience expands across many different teams within your organization. From ticket sales to community relations, from operations to the sponsorship activation team, everyone owns their own part of the customer experience but there is usually no one person looking at the entire customer experience.

For the next week, we’ll be posting a series of tips on how you can prioritize the entire customer experience, deepen emotional connections with your tribe, and ultimately drive more revenue. To the insights delivered right to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter. Otherwise, check back here tomorrow!

Here’s What Your Organization Can Learn

McDonald’s continues to be the gold(en arches) standard when it comes to strategic partnerships targeting Gen Z. 

Back in September 2020, the company announced a collaboration with rapper Travis Scott, marking the first time the fast food giant used a celebrity name on its menu since Michael Jordan in 1992.  The Travis Scott Meal, which was a Quarter Pounder with cheese, bacon and lettuce, medium French fries with barbecue sauce and a Sprite beverage, was only available for a month but drove the entire chain’s sales for the back half of the year. 

After the successful run with Travis Scott, McDonald’s doubled down,  announcing a new collaboration yesterday with Korean K-Pop Band, BTS. According to BBC News, The K-pop band was the top-selling act of 2020 and has 34.5 million followers on Twitter, 40 million Instagram followers and 31.8 million followers on TikTok. 

How is all this relevant to your athletic department? You may not have McDonald’s marketing budget but here are three takeaways:

1. Don’t reinvent the wheel – My favorite part of these collaborations? There’s nothing new from a menu perspective for McDonald’s. Rather it’s just packaging a couple products together in a meal and slapping a nametag on it. A marketing tactic. For your marketing department, you may already have a huge library of great old content that just needs to be repurposed and delivered in a creative way to a new audience.

2. Work backward from your ideal outcomes – I’m guessing there was a lot of internal strategizing before McDonald’s landed on collaborating with Gen Z artists. The fast food chain hadn’t partnered with an influencer since 1992! But if you look at what McDonald’s hoped to achieve – attracting younger customers and driving digital order with discounts – teaming up with popular artists makes plenty of sense. Whether it’s a new marketing campaign or a sponsorship activation, your organization should work backward from the ideal outcome to ensure you have the right process in place to meet those outcomes.

3. Leveraging existing audiences is often better than organic growth – We live in a society where the loyalty to brands and creators has never been higher. Rather than try and organically grow a Gen Z following which have involved heavily investing in digital production and creating new content, McDonalds realized it could tap into the massive followings of these artists through strategic partnerships. Your department probably can’t get Travis Scott or BTS to promote your school, but can you leverage audiences of your famous alumni?  

If you want to read more about strategies to attract Gen Z, my colleague Charles addressed the topic in the latest Chatting Sports Tech article. Check it out!

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Nike released a landing page and Instagram account for Nothing but Gold, a social commerce app targeting Gen Z women. The website is in beta, but sounds like the app will combine TikTok-like features, community aspects and sales channels. Check out this Front Office Sports article for more details.  

Here are three lessons from Nike’s Nothing but Gold decision applicable to your athletic department:

1. Control your community – Nike has heavily focused on building their DTC channels. The biggest example was the global sportswear company announcing it would no longer sell through Amazon. By building applications, Nike is creating its own community of consumers while collecting real-time behavioral feedback that can be turned into new products. Few brands have as deeply loyal customers as Nike but College Athletics is one of them. Yet, most schools we’ve spoken with use their existing mobile app as an information hub rather than a platform to engage their fans. If that’s your department, give the Enterprise Solutions team a call – we’ve helped multiple schools think through their digital strategy when it comes to mobile apps 

2. Personalized experiences are key – My favorite part of Nike’s Nothing but Gold app? The fact the app targets a specific customer segment. Nike clearly understands that with its massive customer base, different demographics have different purchasing habits. The strategy to sell to millennial male NBA fans needs to be differentiated from the strategy to sell to Gen Z women. As an athletic department, your fans want personalized experiences. Having separate apps for different fan segments may be unrealistic but are you finding successful ways to segment and target different fan groups with personalized experiences? If not, what technologies do you need to be successful? 

3. Fan engagement & commerce are becoming intertwined – Social commerce is the term commonly used. Combining a social element (Nothing but Gold’s TikTok-like features) with a sales channel helps maximize revenue. If you already own someone’s attention, it’s much easier to sell to them. If you aren’t embracing social commerce, you’re missing out on opportunities for customized merchandise drops or unique experience sales.  

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Yesterday with one of our clients, we hosted a virtual whiteboard session, a fairly standard practice for how we run meetings now. It’s amazing how much more effective those virtual whiteboard meetings are than your standard “go around the room” Zoom meetings. 

With a small group of 8 people from across the department, we started the meeting by framing a few very specific challenges… 

• “How might we excite fans after they purchase a Football Season Ticket for the first time?”
• “How might we educate fans after they purchase a Football Season Ticket for the first time?”; 
• “How might we continue to educate fans after they renew their Football Season Ticket?”

You may be tempted to combine these questions into one. But by separating them out, distinctly different suggestions arise. With the virtual whiteboard session, we put a silent activity timer on the screen, and the virtual post it notes start flying. 

Since everyone can contribute at the same time, and removed the ability for people to ramble on about one idea, we get a high quantity of ideas. We can expand on quality for only the ideas that really catch our attention. Though it might be counter-intuitive, the constraints in this session serve to create MORE ideas. The timer creates a sense of urgency, and limiting the idea to a post-it notes forces clarity of thought. 

After just 15 minutes of brainstorm, we had over fifty distinct ideas across the three questions. That speed allowed us to quickly move toward mapping when in the customer journey they should get that communication, moving us towards building a larger communication calendar.

Creating deeper emotional connections with your tribe often starts by looking within. Do your current systems & processes empower your employees to engage with customers, or are they roadblocks for your employees to overcome?

If you even thought to answer “roadblocks,” we’re here to help. Pro sports teams and college athletics departments around the country use us as a guide for connecting deeper with the people they serve. If you’re on a journey to better engage your customers and employees, drop me an email at davidm@engagemintpartners.com and we’ll see if we can help.

A first of its kind customer experience program in college athletics just launched today at Penn State. 

For the last few months, members of the EngageMint team and Penn State Athletics team have been working on this. We’re excited to see the big impact it will have both externally & internally.

https://gopsusports.com/news/2021/3/23/general-nittany-lion-feedback-program-announced.aspx

It’s not a new concept by any means, but it is one of the first in college athletics at this scale (that we know of). To form the group, we talked to a few other sports & entertainment organizations who have built something similar, including the WWE, Atlanta Hawks and the Indiana Pacers. 

Imagine it as an expanded fan council, focused more on quantity & frequency of feedback, rather than quality and depth. We’ll have a diverse group of 2k fans who volunteer to be surveyed on a frequent basis, on a wide variety of topics, throughout the year. The goal of the program is to increase the frequency at which we communicate with superfans, and allow them to have a little more ownership of the experience they are so passionate about. 

The program is a testament to Penn State’s investment in innovation and trying to become more customer-centric every day.

Here are some of the impacts from this program I’m excited about:

1. It should deepen emotional connections w/ fans by allowing them to weigh in on department decisions… that doesn’t mean we’ll always do EXACTLY what fan sentiment tells us, but we’ll always listen & provide updates.
2. Strengthen trust with fans through transparency. We’re taking a “You Said, We Listened” approach, sharing key insights from the surveys with the group. We’ll try to be just as transparent about what’s NOT being done with the data as what is.
3. Breaking down silos internally by allowing all departments to submit survey topics. If the food and beverage team wants to understand pregame eating habits, we’ll run a survey on that. If the development and fundraising team wants to understand fans’ deeper motivations towards charitable giving, we’ll run that.
4. Surveys will be focused on specific, focused topics, but we’ll share that data across the department to make better decisions as one team. It shifts the entire department to become more customer-centric by making decisions grounded in data.
5. This allows us to make smarter financial investments by testing how the market feels before committing resources to specific projects. Rather than merely thinking a Pet Club is a good idea and investing time and $ into the intiative, we’ll run a survey to understand PSU fan relationships with their pets before spinning our wheels on a project the market had no appetite for. (That’s a hypothetical example, I love Pet Clubs because people irrationally spend $ on their pets.)
6. The experimental nature of the program becomes a vehicle to shift the department culture towards “done is better than perfect.” Too often in traditional industries, everything has to be perfect before it goes out, which often does more harm than good. With this frequency and high touch, we’ll inevitably make a small screw-up at some point. And we’ll have to recover. But we won’t let that risk detract from our desire to build genuine relationships with fans.
7. The speed and frequency will force us to improve the efficiency of internal approval processes & workflows and increase employee empowerment. I believe a hassle-filled employee experience is often the biggest barrier to delivering an exceptional customer experience.

Penn State Athletics is already one of the best organizations in the sports & entertainment world at delivering incredible fan experiences, and I’m excited to see them take it up even one notch more. 
For more learnings from this project, or to see what else we’re working on, subscribe to our newsletter. Working on something similar? I’d love to hear on Twitter@davidmillay.

We went deep on our latest podcast episode talking about customer service and how to create a service culture within your organization. Shep Hyken, our guest for the episode, covered his six steps for creating a service culture, listed below. Tune in to the full conversation to learn more. 

1. Define your customer service vision

A customer service vision helps to define the expected level of service your customers should experience when doing business with your company. It helps to shape the experiences of both your employees and your customers. To provide a positive experience to your customers, it is important to have a clear vision of what you want your customer service to be.

2. Communicate the vision

When you want to effectively communicate your vision, you want to create a document that is memorable. The more memorable the vision document is, the better. You want to summarize your vision in a single sentence. Get a group together of senior leaders from all different areas to write your vision statement, and then restate it in different ways to make it memorable.

3. Train to the vision

Many organizations make the mistake of training their employees once and checking the box. Training around customer service must be a constant and evolving activity. Customer service skills are foundational, but employees can always use a refresh. More importantly however, is the way you train your employees to respond and anticipate your customer’s emotions while interacting with your policies and processes. Adapting your customer service vision to real-life, everyday practices is the most overlooked aspect of customer service training.

4. Be the example

When I worked at Disney, we really tried to live the philosophy of “the extent to which you show genuine care for your employees is the extent to which they will care for your customers.” If you’ve been working long enough, you’ve probably had a leader who doesn’t practice what he or she preaches. When employees see that expectations don’t apply to their leaders, they follow suit and ignore those expectations themselves. No matter how clear and engaging your customer service statement is, if leaders don’t live by it, you’ll have fancy words on the wall and behaviors that don’t match.

5. Defend the culture

When there is lots of change in your organization, one of the key activities should be to defend the culture that you’ve worked so hard to design. The change could be a new organization-wide software, it could be a new senior leader. The change might even be a global pandemic. When those internal or external pressures are its height, that’s truly the time to defend the essence of the culture while evolving.

6. Celebrate the culture

Celebrating culture is an effective way of showing your employees and customers that you value their contributions and appreciate their work. Too often, I see organizations function on opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end, you have organizations that only celebrate numbers and metrics. On the other end, you have organizations who attempt to celebrate culture, but end up having awards so vague that no one really understands why that person won “employee of the month.” Both can be equally frustrating. One of the best ways to celebrate corporate culture is to design and identify key behaviors that create your culture’s ideal employee, and celebrate when those behaviors are exhibited.

For more, check out the full conversation with Shep here.