The scene is a business hotel in a large US city on the Sunday morning before a major conference. You arrived yesterday evening on the late flight from Heathrow, and now, jetlagged and with a day to kill before your meetings, you are sitting in your room wondering whether to go out for coffee, or to text your colleagues to see if they’re awake yet.
Idly doom-scrolling through social media, you realise that many hours and an ocean away, the 20 Formula One drivers are lining up on the grid for a race that may decide the World Driver’s Championship. You turn on the TV and flick through the channels. All you get is local cable and rolling news.
But not to worry. You connect your tablet to the hotel Wi-Fi, open up the F1TV app, tap on the livestream, and select the international commentary feed. The picture resolves and right there in your hotel room you hear the voices of David Croft and Martin Brundle, as if you’d never left home.
That you can do this at all is testament to the technological journey that Formula One has been on over the past seven years since its acquisition by Liberty Global. In January 2017, Liberty inherited a sport that had been controlled by one man, Bernie Ecclestone, for many years. In Ecclestone’s day, the boss’s word was law, and if he didn’t fancy something much, it wasn’t going to happen.
“Prior to Liberty, we were very much a B2B organisation,” Matt Kemp, F1 head of CRM and customer operations, tells Computer Weekly at Salesforce’s annual Dreamforce event in San Francisco – a couple of days after the 2024 Azerbaijan Grand Prix, won by McLaren’s Oscar Piastri.
“We worked with local governments and promoters to host races, we put cables round the track to create a broadcast feed which we would then sell on to broadcasters. That created a fan base that allowed us to sell sponsorship and advertising rights and develop partnerships with licensees to sell merchandise and tickets,” says Kemp.
“Bernie did trial some B2C products,” he continues, “but when Liberty took over, we had less than a million people in our database. They came in and said, ‘You’re missing a huge opportunity here. If you understand what the data is and who your fans are, you can talk to them direct, you’ll be able to build your own B2C operation and monetise that base so much better’.”
Backed by Liberty’s cash, F1’s technical teams set to experimenting with a whole suite of new products and services. Kemp recalls the atmosphere being like an entrepreneurial startup, with loads of new concepts and ideas floating around.
Some of these were successes, some failures. For example, the team realised early on that it needed to harmonise the data points it was collecting from fans, so they put in place a data aggregator and a data warehouse, which by Kemp’s own admission was not particularly well thought through.
“It was all very reactionary…Every race weekend was like Groundhog Day,” he says. “We would segment the data and segment the data and segment the data, and we’d build emails from scratch, the imagery, the content, everything.
“There were a number of things we were trying to achieve at that stage as a business,” says Kemp. “Liberty saw an opportunity in gathering that data and how we could use that data, but there was a belief that our fans were aging and therefore we need to start to diversify that fanbase. How do we create products and services and solutions that diversify and bring in a new fanbase today?
“There was also a belief that the glory days of racing were over, and our fans were getting a little bit bored of the sport, because it was just almost like cars going round a track one after the other. So, how do we inject changes that make racing exciting again?”
It was clear for Formula One that it needed to engage differently with fans by using new platforms and augmenting its core product. Old school fans who stuck with the sport will recall some of these changes – probably the biggest of which were the launch of F1TV in 2018 and the tie-up with producers at Netflix that produced the successful Drive to survive documentary series
And the statistics bear out. F1’s fanbase now skews younger, almost 50% now falls into the 18-34 age bracket, and there are far more women watching too. The second point is a rather more subjective one, but compared to 2023, when 19 of 22 races were won by Max Verstappen, the 2024 season has certainly been more competitive.
“This year, I think, is…all that work over the past few years [coming] to fruition,” says Kemp.
Over the past few years, Formula One’s relationship with Salesforce has been an integral part of the changes the fans are seeing. The two organisations first teamed up in 2019 when Formula One took on Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, having realised that its ticketing solution was unmanageable and unfit for purpose.
“We knew we needed a CRM system because our commercial teams were all working off Excel spreadsheets. There’s no way, in this day and age, a company like Formula One should be working off Excel spreadsheets, so that all had to change in a very short space of time,” says Kemp.
Personalising the fan journey
Now, almost six years on, fan engagement is ramping up, and Formula One is moving rapidly away from the week-by-week approach to one where it is able to create “always-on” journeys that are personalised and tailored to the individual fans. Kemp says this is a game changer. “We’re getting really smart at it,” he adds.
From a base of pretty much nothing, Salesforce has helped Kemp create a single pane-of-glass profile for every fan, and the organisation is now able to cross-pollinate various segments to get better about how it targets fans. “We understand what your favourite team is, who your favourite driver is, and [whether] you are more likely to be interested in tickets or in merchandise,” says Kemp.
Having built these fan profiles, Formula One is also using Salesforce to personalise the fans’ journeys. Among other things, it is using its tech to establish what content is most valuable to whom, accounting for factors such as who is reading it, how long they read it for (dwell times) and how relevant it is to their individual fan profile, and positioning it higher up in tailored email outreach. According to Kemp, since starting this practice, Formula One has seen a 27% uplift in open rates on emails to fans.
“The next piece is how we join that data together,” says Kemp. “For example, if someone buys a ticket for the Las Vegas Grand Prix, as soon as they buy that ticket, they will go on a journey, and that journey will consist of understanding what they need to do in the lead-up.”
For example, they may be open to being upsold a better ticket, or merchandise. A few days prior to the event, they will start receiving information about their day at the track – is it going to be raining and might they want a branded umbrella? This is admittedly unlikely in Las Vegas, but for Silverstone or Spa-Francorchamps, it could prove a hot-ticket item.
On the day itself, they will get more immediate information to make the experience better, such as where to park, what shuttle buses to catch, where to access the grandstand, where the food concessions are, and so on.
For fans who have bought extras, such as Paddock Club access and pit lane walks, Kemp wants to build even more premium experiences, so that the teams in the hospitality suites can greet them by name, or have their favourite drink ready and waiting when they walk in. “All this kind of stuff,” says Kemp, “is what we are now able to start to think about.”
That sounds cool, but ultimately, less than 1% of Formula 1 fans actually go to a race, and a good number don’t even particularly care about the racing – they prefer the glamorous lifestyle content and want to know not how Lewis Hamilton is doing in the driver’s championship, but what designer he was photographed wearing, his off-track work supporting black artists and creators, or updates on his dog, Roscoe.
None of this would have even been considered during the Ecclestone era, but now, it’s something the sport can start to tap into.
From AI to F1
As Salesforce gears up to go big on its AgentForce agentic artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities, launched amid great fanfare at Dreamforce 2024, Formula One is experimenting with bringing even more capabilities to bear within its fan engagement processes, specifically, in dealing with queries from fans.
And fans do have a lot to ask. Currently, about 70% of Formula One’s inbound contacts relate, unsurprisingly, to the F1TV app, but it will also naturally receive inquiries about ticketing and merchandising, questions about the sporting rules or regulations, and technical asks about the cars, such as how the drag reduction system (DRS) actually works.
“And we’ll get requests for charity, we’ll get wedding invitations,” says Kemp. “We’ll get questions like, ‘Why are you racing in Saudi Arabia?’. We get all sorts, anything and everything!
“We’ve actually been implementing GPT [Generative Pre-Trained Transformer] within Salesforce for a couple of months,” he continues. “This November is the next phase and this is where it will become really exciting.
“The initial tests we have run so far show that about 70% of our processes, or contacts, can go through GPT and that can take our average contact handling time from about 18 minutes down to two, and it increases the quality of those responses. Our fan satisfaction is already at 90%, we think we can push that as high as 95% using GPT, but only if we can ground those responses better.”
How will AgentForce help do this? Kemp explains: “What you’re really doing is putting all that unstructured data into a database and it’s searching all of those previous responses, looking for where they have been successful, to provide a much more contextualised, personalised response based on our past experience of past data.
“It means that instead of a 50% reduction in average handling time we’re potentially looking to as much as a 70% to 90% reduction in average handling time because it’s able to just look at past responses,” he says.
“AgentForce should, in theory, say, ‘Well, I don’t care if you want to go for 70%, I can look at everything you’ve done before if I’ve got a couple of examples of it and I can use those as a template, and I can provide a response for that’. An agent may still need to edit it, but at least now we’ve got a response you can work with, which means that for the 30% we weren’t dealing with before we’ll be able to reduce that average handling time as well.
“There’ll always be that human at the helm,” he stresses, “but that average handling time and the quality of that response will increase exponentially and so will the consistency of the response.”
But eventually this may be just one ingredient in the solution – Formula One still has all its other Salesforce tools in play, so Kemp hopes to one day go beyond providing responses to questions, but also to understand if the fan was happy with the response and how it was dealt with.
“Did it deal with what they need? What do the propensity scores look like? Have they got a propensity to churn or to purchase? Is there an opportunity, if someone’s given a thumbs up and says they’re happy, to then sell to them? Is there upsell or cross sell? We can now start to think about building all that,” he says.
Trust and red flags
Like other speakers and attendees at the 2024 Dreamforce event, Kemp has a lot to say about the red lines – red flags in Formula 1 parlance – that AI cannot be allowed to cross, and the guardrails that need to be put in place to ensure its safe and ethical use.
He makes it very clear that Formula 1 is not – for now – putting Salesforce’s AI directly in front of the fans. All the technology is currently empowered to do is create a template for a human to assess whether or not their outreach or response is appropriate.
“This is not something we’re going to serve directly at fans. We don’t believe the technology currently is mature enough to go there,” he says, “and we want to measure those thresholds so we can start to see how many of the AI responses we are editing. We’re not going to be happy with just 90% being successful, we can’t let that loose. It’s got to be 100% successful for a brand like Formula 1.”
Is there a future in which a fan might engage directly with AI? “I think we’d have to look at it on a process-by-process basis,” he says. “It would need to be something as simple as, ‘I want to reset my password’. Maybe we can get to the threshold where we can meet a 100% accurate response to that relatively quickly, whereas with a charity request or a really complex tech issue, getting to that 100% mark is going to be tough because the responses differ significantly.”
Ultimately, maintaining trust in the AI’s output is the most important thing for Formula One, because it is working not with its own data, but with its fans’ data. Therefore, the organisation has to be able to be sure that it’s getting good answers that are augmenting the work its human staffers do to make them more efficient.
“That’s where we see one of the successes going forward. We believe that AgentForce is a really great way to augment our team to do faster, quicker, higher quality output,” he concludes.
Formula One fans might like to know that, at the time of writing, Roscoe Hamilton was spending quality time on the beach, to the delight of nearly 40,000 Instagram followers, amid a busy few days promoting a new sweet potato and peanut butter dog treat. Oh, and Max Verstappen won the championship.
