The South Sydney Rabbitohs NRL club is using Zoom Rooms in its $30 million High-Performance Centre to beam its star players into classrooms in regional areas under its ‘Souths Cares’ program.
Souths Cares is an independent not-for-profit institution that helps “disadvantaged and marginalised youth and their families”.
Chief commercial officer Shannon Donato said the Zoom Rooms are used so that high-profile players can participate in program delivery, without impacting their club commitments.
“Souths Cares goes out into schools and delivers programs, and the players are the hook,” Donato said.
“The players are the superstars. Everyone wants to be Latrell Mitchell, or wants to be Cody Walker, but getting those players out to regional communities is not easy.
“The players’ time is very limited, obviously, and their focus is on training, so building Zoom Rooms into every one of the meeting rooms and into our studio at our new High-Performance Centre means that our players just need to literally walk into that Zoom Room, and they can be in a classroom anywhere in Australia.
“Rather than having to throw them on a plane, fly them in, do a presentation at a couple of schools in regional towns, fly them out and lose a day, we can have a player doing a presentation in 30 minutes anywhere in Australia.
“That’s enormously grown the reach of not only the football club, of what we do, but also grown the reach of what we do in the community and engaging the community.”
Zoom is one of the Rabbitohs’ corporate sponsors under a long-running deal.
That has also led the club utilising Zoom technology, not just in the High-Performance Centre, but also to run webinars and its corporate phone system.
Regular webinars called ‘Ask the Bosses’ are run, where corporate sponsors, members and other paid stakeholders are able to interact with and ask questions of the club’s CEO, coach or the club’s leadership group such as the captain.
Donato also talked up the benefits both he personally, as well as the club, has seen from using Zoom Phone for corporate telephony.
He noted that the club had a significant media presence, and that issues could arise that required his immediate attention, although he might be occupied in a meeting.
He also said Zoom’s phone transcription feature allowed incoming calls to go unanswered but to be turned into emails, enabling Donato to “discreetly” check messages while in meetings.
The next steps for the club include the possible implementation of Zoom’s AI-based work platform and sales enablement tools such as its revenue accelerator capabilities.
The feature uses machine-learning algorithms to turn customer interactions into insights for finding opportunities, assessing risks and improving sales team performance.
“Sponsorship is the financial lifeblood of our club, it’s really important, and allows us to fund a rugby league team and the work that we do in the community,” Donato said.
“We’ve got a sponsorship team and a sponsorship sales team and knowing that their calls, their meetings can be summarised, sentiment taken out of that and used to improve what we do in real-time is amazing functionality,
“I’m really excited to learn more. I think that would have huge applications for our business and growing our sponsorship revenue,” Donato said.