How Golf Operations Technology “Should” Make Your Life Easier
I’ll bet you were thinking this issue was going to be about the GolfNow acquisition of EZLinks/Teeoff.com, didn’t you? True to our contrarian form, it’s not but I am going to find a way to incorporate some tangential references so if any of you bet with your friends on it, you could at least argue that it’s a draw vs. having to pay up.
What long-time colleague Stuart Lindsay and I find curious (and hard to believe) is that with all the comings and goings, mergers and acquisitions in the technology space which we’ll define as tee sheets, Point-of-Sale (PoS), broadcast email and digital marketing (web and social media), as an industry we haven’t made much forward progress on making the tools better, easier-to-use or integrated. In this issue, I’ll share the outline of a blueprint for enhancements and integration that Stuart and I shared with the GolfNow folks back in ’13 when they hosted us for a preview of their “revolutionary” G1 platform which was going to be launched and in 500 facilities by the end of the next calendar year (that would have been 6+ years ago for those of you counting and, like Golf 20/20, they “missed it by that much” channeling Maxwell Smart). In this issue we’ll touch on 3 areas where there’s significant room for improvement:
- Enhancements in basic reporting – basics like comparative reporting (this year vs. last year in a single report), standardized revenue departments, automated scheduled “push” reporting and exception/alerts
- Any form of insightful customer analysis – being able to understand which customers/groups are driving advances/declines in your rounds and revenue and being able to differentially communicate with them and be more relevant
- Integrating disparate technology tools & information – I’ll outline a blueprint roadmap of links that could/should be made between your technology providers and their tools and what you would do differently with the resulting insights
The good news is that we’re in promising (hopeful?) conversations with one of the legacy PoS providers and several of the newer, cloud-native players regarding bringing this blueprint to life a decade after its inception. The technology and tools now fully exist and are commercial grade so what remains will be finding the combination of collaboration (creating the “wiring” to pass information automatically), designing the reports and outputs of the integrated systems and gaining market interest/adoption (the latter of which will require an affordable economic model for the average facility owner/operator with quantifiable Return-on-Investment (RoI) evidence). No problem, right? We’re going to attempt to deliver it in 2020.
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