The biggest professional men’s US golf tour, PGA (Professional Golfers’ Association) Tour, says that the use of Experience Management (XM) tools and techniques is allowing it to move beyond retrospective customer outreach and more towards real-time, closed-loop feedback – enabling the organization to move from fragmented, hard-to-compare data to a coherent, standardized program that is starting to guide strategy.
Specifically, by combining live feedback, research data and operational metrics it is perfecting what the organization calls its new Fan Engagement Index – linking what customers say about their experience at Tour events online with improved outcomes such as higher ticket sales and improved engagement.
For example, event attendees can now easily submit feedback through QR codes dotted across tournament venues, with responses now piped directly to operations teams during the event, allowing any issues to be addressed while tournaments are still underway.
The plan is to extend the reach of XM across each phase of the entire PGA Tour tournament journey, including ticketing, concessions and special events.
For Zach Carlson, Director of Strategic Insights at the organization,
My job here is to understand who our fans are and how we can better engage with them.
And to do that we’re doing a lot of work to measure their experience and satisfaction and provide insights and strategy off it.
Next steps on the Tour’s engagement management journey, he says, include exploring the use of data – and AI-created ‘synthetic panels’ to better understand and model casual sports fans – who are traditionally notoriously difficult to reach through conventional research methods.
‘Extremely fragmented’
Carlson works for a leading professional golf organization operating a series of men’s golf tournaments in the United States and several international events.
These include the season-long FedExCup, which is based on players’ performance throughout the season, while the body employs over 1,300 employees.
Overall the Tour will host over 50 tournaments in 2026, with a standard weekly tour event attracting anywhere between 40,000 to 150,000 visitors.
It is important to note that PGA Tour is separate from the PGA of America, with the former focusing on tournaments for touring professional golfers, while the latter is primarily for golf professionals and handles events like the PGA Championship and the Ryder Cup.
In any case, Carlson says his specific business problem was that a single poor experience like long food queues, maintenance issues or other operational problems can have a lasting impact on a fan of ‘the royal and ancient game’s’ loyalty and future attendance.
The way feedback was gathered, especially post-event, was extremely fragmented; we were able to get very ‘micro’ level event to event, but then comparing all that across the year and standardizing it wasn’t really there.
For example, the Tour was using a number of providers for digital feedback, fan communities, and on-site surveys, and some tournaments were running their own one-off questionnaires.
In addition, as some Tour tournaments are run by independent tournament organizations, some could pass on useful information, but there was no consistent way to compare results or standardize insights across the entire calendar.
That lack of overall transparency was becoming a problem, he points out, as:
We’re in a very competitive landscape here – not only just within professional sports, but entertainment at large; people are spending their time on all different kinds of platforms, and new, exciting things are always popping up at your fingertips.
So, we’re really competing for the attention of our fans, and if we’re not providing a really compelling fan experience, whether that’s broadcast, whether it’s digital, whether it’s on site, then we’re going to lose their interest.
His colleague from the Tour’s Comms team, Chris Cox, adds:
We need to always be striving to give our fans the best, most seamless experience, no matter where they are – whether that’s watching from home or watching inside or outside the ropes at a PGA Tour event.
‘Siloed feedback areas into one central location’
Carlson says conversations with specialists – focused on fan engagement by gathering and analyzing feedback to improve customer, employee, and business outcomes – started in 2020.
These eventually led to the decision to commit to working with Provo and Seattle-based XM vendor Qualtrics, who we last wrote about here.
A number of the vendor’s offerings, including its Social Connect and Customer and Employee XM tools, are now being used.
Since their introduction, he states, slowly but surely all of the Tour’s previously siloed feedback areas have been integrated into a central location as part of a conscious move to integrated, data-driven experience management.
Now, says Carlson, Tour central management has a unified view across events and touchpoints – covering not just fans but also internal employees, professional players, and partners.
As a direct result, instead of relying on gut instinct or historical precedent, decision makers now get insights “exponentially faster.”
That means, says Carlson, data and research are a routine part of how new PGA Tour products and experiences are shaped. Programs like a new PGA Tour closed-loop on-site feedback initiative, its “Fan Forward” program, and “Voice of the Gallery” standardized post-event survey, for example, are giving Operations actionable input in real time and after each tournament.
That means, claims the organization, it is finally able to track whether it is growing its fan base and attracting a more diverse, younger cohort, as well as aggregate total Tour engagement across digital, broadcast, and on-site.
Voice of the Gallery, for instance, has 100,000-plus fan responses, while Fan Forward has 50,000 responses and the app and PGA Tour website are now up to 5.4 million unique visits per month.
But hard numbers on the specific business benefits of all this are not at this stage being shared, it seems:
Our use case is a little bit different to say, hotel chains that can tightly tie feedback scores to ROI and repeat bookings, so it’s kind of hard to put a clean ROI number on all this for now.
Next Steps
After proving the approachowned-and-operated PGA Tour events, the next step is to extend those programs to all tournaments – including co-sanctioned ones – and ensure operations teams know how to act on the insights
So, says Carlson, a new standardized post-event survey will be pushed further into the organization – the idea being that all best-in-class fan experiences at events can be identified and replicated across the schedule.
In parallel, he wants to further expand the Fan Engagement index
The latter is a new concept in market research that uses Large Language Model tech.
This is used to build a statistically modeled panel that estimates changes over time by matching similar respondents across separate surveys, rather than following the same individuals longitudinally.
PGA Tour wants to use this technique, concludes Carlson, to understand the general sports consumer in deeper ways that traditional panel research alone can’t deliver:
To me, all this – and panels – is just really about using data and insights to improve the fan, player, and partner experience.
