The Jockey Club

The Challenge

With the rapid pace of disruption and growing customer expectations fuelled by emerging digital trends, The Jockey Club recognised that it was not taking full advantage of its own digital channels, and wanted to maximise the opportunities that they can provide. There were a number of objectives that The Jockey Club had set for their digital transformation programme:

• Generate insights into customer behaviour and demand across its different courses and business divisions
• Help to deepen relationships with existing customers and encourage them to become more regular race goers
• Create new customers and appeal to new audiences who may not be aware of the different aspects to the business and the range of activities on offer

Understanding the opportunities within the context of the UK’s largest commercial horse racing organisation presented an exciting challenge for the Other Media team with our expertise across sport, commerce and digital delivery.

Our Approach

We call our approach Creative Intelligence and it centres on gaining a deep understanding of customer needs and organisational goals by using qualitative and quantitive data inputs, workshops, competitor analysis, customer interviews, and an audit of the current digital properties.

Our highly inclusive toolkit allowed us to quickly deliver a clear roadmap showing how user experience will benefit from a redefined digital platform in tandem with the development of a future-proofed customer experience strategy that supports the long-term ambitions of The Jockey Club while providing an engaging and immersive digital experience for horse racing fans.

Our solution

To develop a clear and achievable customer experience strategy, we undertook a number of key tasks in this project:

• A series of staff workshops looking at the current digital offering and how it supported customer needs, staff requirements, brand positioning and marketing opportunities
• Use of data analytics to see how the current sites were used, where roadblocks existed and how the different sites were managed and maintained by the marketing teams
• Understanding how the current sites were used through detailed analytics followed to see how staff perception and actual usage were matched
• Qualitative surveys carried out with staff
• Conducting a series of customer interviews using a ‘Jobs to be Done’ approach to discover exactly what customers needs were – why does a customer choose to interact with The Jockey Club rather than any other alternative way to spend their leisure time and leisure money

The outcomes of these tasks informed the development of a strategy focusing on:

• The customer experience  – looking at what users needed to achieve at different points in their user journey
• Recommendations around technical architecture and engagement tools to use
• Exploring web and mobile working better together to ensure a seamless customer experience as a race goer moved through their journey with The Jockey Club
• Reflecting the race day experience through digital channels
• Content and functionality that should be made available to the race goer at particular times
• The most effective technical platforms to support the ambitions of the project to ensure success
• Simplifying the user journey by better systems integration including CRM, CMS, analytics, and seamless movement between desktop and mobile devices
• Better visibility online through a co-ordinated approach to SEO, SEM, and domain architecture