This article was first published on BandT.com.au by Edward Pollitt.
As subscription video services continue to surge in popularity, the market is becoming increasingly competitive.
It’s now imperative for services to find a way to stand out.
When Kayo Sports launched in November last year, the aim was to satisfy Australia’s seemingly endless thirst for sport.
But as well as offering over 50 sports live and on demand, Kayo has also leveraged its data capabilities in a bid to stand out from the crowd.
Kayo Sports’ chief audience, commerce and data officer Adam King [right-hand side of feature image] told B&T how the sports subscription service moved beyond using data just for insights to a more actionable method by creating its own customer data platform.
The platform stitches together various customer insights from different stages of the life cycle – such as acquisition, on-boarding, engagement and retention – into a single view, which can then be used to improve the overall performance of the platform.
“Get rid of the word data, it’s about customers,” he said.
“Understand the customer, what they’ve done, what they’re going to do, what they’re doing right now and then it’s very easy to understand how you can make the life cycle journeys better.”
King was speaking as part of subscription management platform Zuora’s ‘Subscribed’ event in Sydney last week.
Kayo and Zuora earlier this year announced a partnership that sees a customer-orientated billing system in place between the two companies.
Alongside data, the service has also had to rethink its approach to factors like customer retention and churn.
Unlike with subscribers of Netflix, some Kayo subscribers may only be interested in one sport that is only on for a few months a year.
This means an AFL fan might want to stop their subscription come the end of the season, only to reactivate it when the next season kicks off.
“We want to make sure we understand our customer,” King said.
“And knowing there are those that will naturally reengage with us because that’s the concept they want and the experience they want.
“We do surface other content to them, but we don’t break the trust or the value proposition of what we’ve put in place.”
As part of its offering, Kayo has also endeavoured to create a sign-up process that will take a potential viewer around three minutes.
As well as ensuring potential viewers don’t miss the kick-off of a game they are desperate to catch, this also creates a point of different for the service.
“I would hope that the signup journey is completely forgettable,” said King.
“If I talk to someone about their Kayo experience from signing up yesterday, I want them to tell me about the features and the content they’ve consumed. The last thing I want to hear about this is the signup journey.
“Signing up should be that quick and effortless. It shouldn’t be something that you really think about.”