Professional golf has a problem that many sports don't share. A fan who attends THE PLAYERS or TOUR Championship won’t be back for another 12 months (or more). That means every operational shortcoming—a backed-up food line, a maintenance lapse—has a long-lasting impact on their takeaway of the experience.
That's the pressure the PGA TOUR operates under, and it's shaping how the organization thinks about data, feedback, and what it means to actually serve fans.
Fan attention is hard to win, and easily lost
Golf tournaments aren't two-hour events. Fans arrive early each day, stay late, and spend seven to ten hours navigating a sprawling property alongside thousands of strangers. And the PGA TOUR knows that it’s competing not just against other sports, but against every other form of entertainment and media available to a consumer on any given day.
"If we don't get the experience right for the fans, then we're not going to keep their attention," said Zach Carlson, the TOUR’s Director of Strategic Insights.
For Carlson and his colleagues, that's not just a customer satisfaction problem; it's an existential one. Fans who leave disappointed stay home next year and can disengage entirely. In a sports landscape where attention is increasingly at a premium, the PGA TOUR can't afford to hand back what it earns.
Overcoming the feedback lag
For years, getting a complete picture of the fan experience was harder than it should have been. Feedback arrived through multiple channels including digital, social, and community panels, and it wasn’t centrally managed.
"Before Qualtrics all of our feedback and insights were fragmented across different platforms," Carlson said.
Time was an equally limiting factor. Survey data trickled in after events were over, sometimes weeks later. Courtney Crews, the TOUR’s Director of Activation Services, put it plainly: "We were finding out two or three weeks post-event that we ran out of something on Friday.”
Post-event learning is still useful, but it comes at the wrong speed for a business where each event is a one-shot opportunity. By the time the data came in, the fans had already gone home.
Moving from understanding to outcomes with Qualtrics
The shift to Qualtrics® changed the tempo. The TOUR moved from retrospective analysis to real-time closed-loop feedback, with fan input collected via QR codes placed throughout tournament grounds and within the PGA TOUR mobile app. Now results aggregate daily and push directly to the operations team during the event.
"The ability to get live feedback is paramount for us," Crews said. "We can fix a lot in a moment if we know about it.”
Carlson described how the integration of live feedback with research data enables a more complete view. What fans say can now be cross-referenced against what fans actually do. That connection between stated experience and observed behavior is what the TOUR’s Fan Engagement Index is built on. This measure combines NPS, CSAT, and operational data like ticket sales to understand whether the needle is actually moving on customer experience.
The closed-loop model also allowed the TOUR to standardize its post-event survey across every sanctioned and owned-and-operated event through the Voice of the Gallery program, creating consistent tournament-to-tournament benchmarking for the first time.
Reading the break, making it right
At the FedEx St. Jude Championship in Memphis, a local barbecue vendor was getting overwhelmed. Lines were 20-plus people deep; a single staff member was running the point of sale, and no one on the operations team knew. The first signal came through a Qualtrics QR code scan. "It hit our phones," Crews recalled, "and we went right to fixing it." The situation was resolved in ten to fifteen minutes. The team made adjustments for the rest of the week.
At THE PLAYERS Championship—the TOUR’s flagship event—a routine overnight cleaning was disrupted, and a restroom on hole four was missed. As fans made their way out early in the morning, submissions flagged the problem in real time. The operations team saw it and dispatched a crew immediately.
In both incidents, the gap between something going wrong and someone knowing about it had been reduced to minutes. For fans who drove hours and took a day off work to be there, those minutes matter in a way that no post-event apology can account for.
Getting a complete picture of fans beyond the usual gallery
The TOUR is now asking what else becomes possible when nine-plus years of fan research lives in a single, searchable system.
Carlson points to Qualtrics as a game changer. His team has been conducting research studies for nearly a decade, but surfacing historical insights on demand has always been cumbersome. With Qualtrics, he just has to ask.
The TOUR is also exploring synthetic panels. Its core golf audience is reachable. The casual fan—the general sports consumer the TOUR is trying to understand and attract—is harder to get to. Synthetic panels offer a way to model that elusive segment, filling in the picture of fandom that traditional panel research alone can't deliver.
Both capabilities point toward the same goal the closed-loop program made possible at the operational level: closing the gap between what the TOUR knows and what it needs to know, and acting on that knowledge faster than the competition can.
The players also know that while eyes are always on them, it’s critical to look back with equal appreciation. “We don’t have a game without fan engagement,” said TOUR player Tony Finau. “What do fans want more of? What do they want less of? For Qualtrics to step in, to see how to make that experience better, means everything to us.”
"Having a partner that is in the trenches with you as you grow," Crews says, "and actively working with you—that's not a sponsorship. That's something different."
For the PGA TOUR, offering a guest experience that’s different—in the ways fans appreciate most—is the whole point.
