The future of live sporting events has unquestionably changed, elevating existing demands and introducing a new set of
demands for sports teams and their venues moving forward.
Mobile Payment and Contactless Payments: An
Essential Requirement for Sports Venues
In the ‘new normal’ of live sports, venue operations will need to
reconfigure their supporting teams and systems to achieve the
critical digital competencies enabling safe, efficient, secure events.
A value-add before, supporting and offering secure contactless
payments in-venue is a must-have for the future of live sports.
Contactless payments offer a range of benefits for both fans
and businesses, including:
-
Reduce Physical Contact: with contactless payments,
whether through a mobile device or another form,
helps reduce the number of physical touchpoints in
venue environments. Fans no longer need to touch
keypads, exchange money with concessions staff,
or sign printed receipts.
- Seamless Experiences and Faster Payments: while
attending a live sporting event, no fan wants to wait
in a congested line - then exchange credit card/cash
back and forth. Contactless payments streamline the
payment process by utilizing a single action to complete
the transaction. This increases fan satisfaction and
convenience, allowing them to get back to why they came
in the first place: enjoying the event.
- Generate More Revenue: processing payments and
servicing fans faster businesses will naturally drive more invenue purchases in volume alone. Studies also have shown
if fans are satisfied with the payment process, they’re more
willing to make return visits/purchases as well as spend
more money collectively.
- Support Data Security: contactless payment methods
remove the need to carry cash or credit cards, both of
which can be lost, stolen, and used to purchase goods by
someone else. It’s much more challenging for a thief to run
up charges if a fan can pay through their mobile devices,
facial recognition, biometric screening, etc.
- Integrate with Mobile Platforms & Apps: contactless
payments align with fans’ mobile-centric, digitalized
behaviors and preferences. For teams with a gameday
app, mobile payment options can be integrated into these
platforms to offer even more convenience for fans as well
as help teams increase adoption and usage of the mobile
tools they invested in.
Technology Requirements to Enable
Contactless Payments
How venues deploy and support contactless payments is nearly
as important as the use case itself. Without the right technologies
to enable it the benefits of touchless transactions will not be
realized, leaving fans and staff frustrated with the experience.
To successfully support contactless payments, venues must
leverage an IT networking solution. A purposely designed and
deployed in-venue network provides:
-
Wired and Wireless Connectivity: for any contactless
payment use cases to operate effectively connectivity
is critical; connectivity for fan’s devices and for wired/
wireless point of sale systems. Utilizing the latest Wi-Fi
standard (Wi-Fi 6) with outdoor and weatherproof APs
(IP67 rated) delivers an optimal experience and prevents
any disruption or drop in service. APs with integrated
BLE technology create micro-location analytics and fan
activation opportunities for personalized engagements.
Lastly, of equal importance, installed APs should maintain
the aesthetics of the venue with a ‘hide-in-plain-sight’ look
and feel.
- End-to-End Network Visibility & Management: centralized
wired and wireless network management provides venuewide visibility and control of all connected users and devices.
This simplifies and augments the task of guaranteeing service
delivery during peak hours of operation during a game or
event, maintaining critical uptime for POS devices/payment
systems and identifying any connection disruptions for fans.
- Policy-Based Network Provisioning: policy-based
networking equips sports venues with seamless onboarding
and appropriate network access/privileges for all guest and
business users/devices, alleviating the burden of network
administration and allowing venues to prioritize access for
certain users, devices, and applications – including POS
devices and supporting venue staff.
- Seamless Roaming in Full Venue Deployments: for venues
outfitted with a comprehensive network deployment
across its environment, the ability to roam without a drop
in network connection delivers a better, more convenient
experience to fans; seamless roaming also delivers greater
operational flexibility and efficiency to venues from POS
perspective, and how it ties in with concessions, retail, etc.
Why Work with Extreme Networks
Extreme Networks’ dedicated Sports and Public Venues business unit has a laser focus on designing and
deploying IT network solutions to meet the specific demands of venue environments, now and in the future.
We work with customers across professional sports, collegiate athletics, racing venues -
forming true partnerships with our customers to enable their critical use cases like contactless payments.
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