- When Deployed – August 2009
- Features enabled - Season ticket access, membership and loyalty
- No of cards issued to date – 14,861
After an exhaustive process to examine all options, Sheffield Wednesday Football Club selected the TeamCard BTED system above all others when implementing a new access control programme at Hillsborough Stadium for the start of the 2009 season. SWFC season ticket holders will now gain access to the grounds using TeamCard barcode technology, allowing the club the ability to swiftly and securely monitor admission activity across all turnstiles. The system was deployed in July 2009 and passed the initial reliability and capacity tests with flying colours.
With the support of the club, the added benefit of the TeamCard loyalty scheme has been embraced by Owls supporters resulting in an initial web registration record of over 20% uptake within the first few days of card receipt. Sheffield Wednesday fans accounted for over 26% of all online related TeamCard loyalty activity in the first month of the new season.
"Sheffield Wednesday has been partners with TeamCard since July 2009. We utilise them for access control to our stadium, using bar code readers.
The initial install was very well project managed and we had little or no issues with installation, which was followed by a rigorous UAT programme, run jointly with the club and our account manager. This process is repeated annually to ensure there are no issues identified prior to the season starting. We were concerned over how our supporters would take to this new system, with our first game being a local derby with over 30k supporters attending the game. All went smoothly and the odd one or two issues we had were more user error and identification of further training requirement than issues with the system. Since then this has worked excellently with little or no problems occurring and when they have the account managers are more than happy to assist, which is really how a good access control system should be.
TeamCard are open to feedback and ideas for improving the system and a have a full process and scheduled rollouts which we have found really helpful, through regular contact with the account manager a great working relationship has been established.
I would recommend this business as a partner for any club looking to utilise access control with the added bonus of being able to offer supporters a loyalty programme, which is beneficial to the supporter and the club. We have just rolled the access control out to corporate areas, which again has been quite a seamless process and been well received by guests."
Carol Axe
Chief Operating Officer
Sheffield Wednesday FC