Exeter City Football Club: How SkyTab Drove Unrivalled Revenue

Have you ever attended a football match and heard “We own our football club!” chanted throughout the stadium? If you spend a day at St. James’s Park, you will.

One of the largest standing terraces in UK football, St. James’s Park is a historic venue with a capacity of roughly 8,500 fans. It’s also home to Exeter City Football Club, now proudly powered by SkyTab and Shift4.

Funded by over 3,000 fans, this supporter-owned club’s primary mission is to master the customer experience on match day. With only 30 match days per year, each one must go off without a hitch.

“Maximising the potential of those match days and improving the experience for supporters is really critical,” says Justin Quick, Chief Operating Officer of Exeter City Football Club.

Unfortunately, the club encountered a problem last season. It relied on an old-style POS system with non-integrated payment processing, and at the beginning of the season, it suffered an outage.

In search of a more reliable venue POS solution with better integration, Exeter City Football Club found SkyTab and Shift4. After a seamless implementation and hands-on training, the club put their new solution to the test. And the result? The first game using Shift4 and SkyTab garnered results that matched the club's best results from last year.

Portable POS Hardware Streamlines Service

One of the club’s primary goals is to optimise match-day operations. Faster service isn’t just better for the customer — it’s also safer for the stadium.

Within those 30 annual match days, there are only a few short sales windows due to regulations prohibiting beer sales during the games. Fans rush to concessions during a 15-minute half-time, garnering long queues that must be cleared quickly.

Now that Exeter City Football Club uses SkyTab Mobile, they can take orders while fans wait in the queue, speeding up sales and getting people back in their seats.

But they’re not just speeding up service with mobile POS — the club is also unlocking new revenue streams.

“We’ve embraced Shift4 across the whole business,” said Justin.

With SkyTab Mobile, staff around the stadium who used to only sell programmes can now upsell food and drink alongside them. These new revenue streams would have previously been intangible with the club’s former solution.

Real-Time Sales Data Enables Smarter Decision-Making

Another key requirement for Exeter City Football Club was better POS and payment system integration. Shift4 and SkyTab’s seamless integration across the entire property, combined with advanced reporting and analytics, allows the club to streamline sales while collecting valuable real-time data.

Justin shared just how crucial this change has been: “The fact that we can now integrate these systems means we can process the transaction that much quicker, but also we can get the data integrated more effectively."

In fact, SkyTab’s POS reports have already highlighted hot spots on match day that the club wasn’t aware of before. With this new data, they can break down revenue by outlet and 15-minute segments. They can also see a sales breakdown to better understand what’s selling and where, enabling them to divert resources.

After just day one, growth opportunities have already revealed themselves.

“We've got quality of reconciled data, but we've also got that data in real-time. We’ve got people watching on match day to understand what revenue is being achieved in those areas. That enables us to move resources around the stadium to drive revenue in busier areas,” says Justin.

Maximising the Match Day Experience

Exeter City Football Club has already enjoyed match-day successes with SkyTab, but it’s eagerly looking to the future. Now that it can provide a seamless payment experience for fans and analyse real-time data, the possibilities are endless.

"I often look at how we used to work, and that was receiving revenue. We're now looking at ways in which we can drive that revenue and make a difference here at Exeter," said Justin.

The club is looking for new ways to take advantage of SkyTab’s wide variety of POS features. Because it is powered by a modern point-of-sale solution, Exeter City Football Club can revolutionise the customer experience while gathering the data they need to grow even further.