SF Giants: Return to In-Person Payments Demands Greater Omnichannel Efficiency

With eventgoers now expecting to be able to order and pay for their food and beverage purchases however they would like across physical and digital channels, sporting arenas are challenged to find new ways to meet these omnichannel expectations without sacrificing efficiency.

Bill Schlough, Senior Vice President and CIO of Major League Baseball (MLB) team (and 2021’s National League West Division Champion) the San Francisco Giants, spoke with PYMNTS about how, over the past few years, the team has managed the rapid shifts from non-mobile payments to all-mobile payments to the current hybrid state of payments at Giants stadium Oracle Park’s concessions stands.

He recalled that, when the state of California mandated earlier in the pandemic that stadiums switch to only remote own-device ordering and payments, rather than ordering and paying at the concessions stands, the team had to scramble to make the shift.

“Most of us sports teams, were not ready for it, and it was a huge challenge. Pre-COVID, we had mobile ordering but less than 1% of our fans were actually using it, and then you went from less than 1% overnight to 100%,” he recalled. “It illustrated to us that we need to make a major upgrade to be able to comply with this new world, and that was a big accelerator.”

Yet, in retrospect, he recalls that, once everyone was accustomed to that new normal, it boosted efficiency, enabling employees to dedicate all their focus to fulfilling orders rather than to taking them. Now, as consumers expect omnichannel convenience enabling them both to order remotely or to pay at the concessions stand, new challenges are emerging.

Schlough noted that the mix of these channels is “a lot harder” than all-mobile or completely non-mobile, and that the team is “still learning in this hybrid world.”  In fact, the team has been somewhat surprised to see the ongoing demand for more traditional ordering and payment methods, and the Giants are looking to drive greater adoption of mobile payments.

Plus, the company has had to get more deliberate about managing lines and cutting out forms of payment that take more time. For example, the team never enabled consumers to pay by dipping their cards, since the dip took longer than the swipe, and now the company is finding that “100% contactless” significantly increases throughput.

Research from the January edition PYMNTS’ Next-Gen Debit Tracker, done in collaboration with PULSE, shows that while 42% of people surveyed said they preferred making transactions by credit card, 36% said they preferred contactless options. The study also found that three-quarters of merchants reported offering contactless payments. Mobile wallets were the most common offerings (63%), followed by touchless card payments (44%) and QR codes (25%).

Get the tracker: Banks Must Do More to Meet Contactless Payment Needs of Debit Card Users

Additionally, the Giants rolled out a new point of sale (POS) system from the stadium’s namesake Oracle, the Oracle MICROS Simphony Cloud POS, at the start of this year’s season, in a move to enable quicker mobile ordering, better digital signage and more comprehensive analytics and data access.

He noted that these data enable the stadium to see which items sell best at which times of the game, enabling vendors to be proactive about menus and about stock levels.

“While we’ve been processing transactions through our old point of sale system for years, we’ve never had access to the data,” Schlough said. “It’s been like a holy grail for us that our business analytics folks have been asking for for years.”