We Lead in Decibels, but Where Do We Rank in Experience?

Soccer fever is already in full swing. Transfer bombshells and refereeing controversies keep coming without a break! And every year around this time, I get worked up in exactly the same way (It has nothing whatsoever to do with how badly Beşiktaş, the club I support and am a member of, has done in recent years 🙂 Then again, we have high hopes for the 2026 season too!): Why do we do almost nothing for the spectator experience in a business we are so passionately devoted to and pour fortunes into?

Reading Michael Brady’s piece in CX Dive on how the NFL uses customer journey technology, I was impressed, and at the same time I found myself thinking about our own league. The problem the NFL faced in 2021, after all, is exactly the one that every big club in Türkiye still hasn’t solved today — and, in fact, neither have hundreds of brands with nothing remotely to do with fans.

The schedule came out, and the fans fled

Here’s how the story begins. When the NFL released its season schedule in 2021, fans received several nearly identical messages: three from their favorite clubs and one from the league itself. According to Amit Khare, the league’s director of marketing technology, the result was predictable — fans started opting out of communications.

The underlying vulnerability here comes from the nature of NFL fandom: about 60% of the league’s fans follow more than one team. That means one person can easily get the same news from four different sources. That is exactly the problem.

The league’s answer today is a “fan engagement engine” built on Adobe’s real-time customer data platform, Journey Optimizer and Customer Journey Analytics. The engine connects to the existing technology stacks of the 32 teams through more than 80 external systems and pulls fan activity across NFL.com, the NFL app, ticketing and live events into a single picture. When the schedule is announced, an orchestration layer decides which team sends what to whom — and, increasingly, when.

The “when” at the end of that sentence is, to my mind, the most elegant part of the whole thing. During games, the system uses in-stadium signals to time communications to the flow of play: a fan watching the third quarter won’t get a marketing message in the middle of the action, but might get one at halftime. As Khare puts it, the point isn’t the message itself but finding the right moment. Simple but effective… More often than not, projects are doomed precisely because these simple things aren’t done properly.

A spectrum from whiteboard to real time

For me, the most instructive part of the piece is where Gartner’s Daniel O’Sullivan places customer journey mapping technologies along a maturity spectrum. At the most basic end are whiteboards and sticky notes; next come PowerPoint presentations, then digital collaboration tools such as Mural and Miro, then dedicated journey mapping platforms such as Journey Track, TheyDo and CX Omni. At the top sit real-time journey analytics and orchestration platforms of the kind offered by Adobe, CSG, Medallia and Qualtrics.

For organizations without real-time orchestration infrastructure, the solutions in the middle can still create value — but O’Sullivan’s warning here is clear: that analysis remains fundamentally reactive. The platforms at the top, by contrast, plug into live event streams and generate the journey visualization directly from customer behavior — and then act on it. As O’Sullivan describes it, nobody sits down and draws a journey map anymore; a massive stream of data flows into the system, and out comes a flow diagram that looks like spaghetti.

When I talk with teams in Türkiye, I often boil this distinction down to one question: is the journey map you have a photograph or a live broadcast? For most of us, it’s a photograph. And one taken last year, framed and hung on the wall at that.

Integration, step by step

The NFL’s implementation choice is at least as striking as its technology choice. The clubs already had their own advanced data platforms; what was missing was the layer connecting them. That’s why Khare’s team didn’t try to migrate 32 teams onto a single platform. Instead, it designed a single integration framework, piloted it with four clubs and then rolled it out in phases — feeding what it learned from later deployments back into the earlier ones.

The results aren’t bad either: once message collisions disappeared, unsubscribes fell, and according to data shared by Adobe, the number of fans registering for the league’s annual draft event rose 91% during this period, while the number of fans buying tickets rose 215%.

Anyone who knows how expensive and how fruitless the “let’s move everyone onto one platform” reflex can be will see the value of this approach. They left the clubs’ autonomy intact and simply filled the gap between them. This is exactly what we run into in Türkiye at holding companies, multi-brand retailers and banking groups: every subsidiary has its own CRM, none of them can see the others, and the “let’s move to a central platform” project is still in the analysis phase in its third year. You already know what comes next…

Where it breaks: identity resolution and internal politics

The most honest part of the piece is saved for the end. Most organizations lack the data foundation these platforms require; what’s more, large organizations tend to be overly optimistic about their own readiness. The hardest piece is identity resolution: being able to tell that the person browsing the website is the same person who was in the mobile app five minutes ago. In O’Sullivan’s words, we tend to assume these big companies have it all figured out — but often they don’t.

That’s why the experts’ advice is modest: pick a single business problem, such as abandoned carts or subscription churn, and prepare the data for that use case, rather than trying to build a comprehensive data foundation first. Katie Costanzo, head of customer experience at CSG, puts it succinctly: start small; you don’t need to boil the ocean.

And the most insidious obstacle of all isn’t technical. Even when the data side is fixed, the process can get stuck in internal politics, because this work cuts across customer service, product, digital and marketing all at once and leads to gridlock at the purchasing and implementation stages. I laughed when I read that, because it’s also the very definition of what we call a “cross-functional project” in Türkiye: a project nobody fully owns, everyone touches a piece of, and no one’s budget pays for.

I hit the same wall when I looked at Talkdesk’s report on agentic automation: while AI adoption stood at 98%, the share able to combine agentic AI with cross-departmental orchestration was stuck at 15%. Different research, different continent, same gap. The problem isn’t what the agents or platforms can do; it’s that the foundation they’re supposed to run on isn’t ready.

So what about our own fans?

Now let me get to the real point. When it comes to the fan experience, soccer in Türkiye has one difference from the NFL, and one similarity.

The difference: we don’t have the NFL’s problem of “the 60% who support more than one team.” Our fans support one team, for life, a loyalty handed down from older family members. So the message-collision problem the NFL had to solve shows up here in a different guise.

The similarity: to the club, the same fan is still not a single person. One record in the ticketing system, another on the season-ticket side, a third in the club store’s e-commerce platform, a fourth in the digital streaming subscription, a fifth in the club’s general assembly membership database. If you know of a Turkish club where these five records talk to one another, I’m genuinely curious, because I’ve never come across one.

The result is plain to see. A fan who has renewed a season ticket for ten years gets a “new season ticket offer” campaign message. Someone heading to an away game gets a discount offer for the home stadium store at that very hour. The forty minutes spent in line at the stadium turnstiles aren’t recorded in any system; neither are the concession line, the restrooms or the stadium exit. The only metric used to measure the match-day experience is attendance — which isn’t an experience metric; it’s a headcount.

The technology side of what the NFL did may be too ambitious for our clubs today, granted. But the approach itself is anything but. A pilot with four clubs, a single integration framework, a single business problem. The first problem a club in Türkiye could pick is hardly a mystery: the season-ticket renewal rate. You already have the data on who renewed, who dropped out and who only shows up for derbies. Bringing it together in a single profile and tying it to action may not be as romantic as the culture in the stands, but it pays off much faster on the revenue side.

I had reached a similar point when writing about FIFA entrusting its 2026 World Cup operation to Salesforce’s Agentforce platform: the sports industry is the most unforgiving testing ground for CX technologies, because when something goes wrong, it happens instantly and in front of everyone.

This isn’t just soccer’s problem

I opened this piece with soccer, but the lesson here reaches much further. At any Turkish brand, the equivalent of what the NFL calls the “orchestration layer” can be measured with one question: how many of your separate teams send messages to the same customer on the same day, and do those teams know about one another?

At a bank, the credit card team, the deposits team and the mobile app team each design their own campaigns. At a retailer, the in-store CRM and the online CRM see the same customer as two separate people. At a telecom operator, the bill reminder, the campaign SMS and the satisfaction survey all line up in the same time slot. Each is a sound decision on its own; taken together, they add up to a customer who turns off notifications.

In my work at Nord CX, I’ve had to put this picture together several times — a simple count showing how many messages reached the same customer within a week, and from how many separate teams. Usually nobody has such a count, because everyone looks at their own channel’s numbers. And seeing the total is often enough to drive a decision.

In the piece where I discussed Gartner’s concept of the dual customer journey, we talked about the need to add a new customer profile — AI — to journey maps. Now another layer is being added: the map has to be live. However many customer profiles you add to a static map, it remains a photograph of the past.

That’s exactly why the question Costanzo closes the piece with has stayed with me: how can we influence the next best experience for every customer in real time?

I know our league is still a long way from asking that question. But it still strikes me as strange that a crowd that tops the world rankings for stadium spectacle and decibels lags so far behind on experience. To avoid heaving the same sigh when next season kicks off, it would be enough for our clubs to ask themselves this question just once: What are we going to do about our fans’ experience?

Update note (October 14, 2026): When this piece was moved to The CX Brief, time references were updated and spelling corrections were made. The content and views of the piece have not changed.