About the NBA‍

The NBA, one of the most recognized professional sports leagues worldwide, continuously strives to enhance fan engagement and the game-day experience. As a global leader in sports and entertainment, the NBA collects extensive feedback from fans through Voice of Fan surveys to better understand their experiences and make data-driven improvements. In the 2024–25 season alone, over 22.3 million fans attended games across the league’s 30 teams, underscoring the scale of its live audience. 

But live events are just one part of the picture, the NBA also manages a growing number of digital customer touchpoints, including:

• NBA App
• NBA League Pass
• NBA ID
• NBA.com

With fans interacting across these multiple digital and physical channels, capturing and synthesizing feedback at scale has become increasingly complex and critical.

Before Dimension Labs

• High-level metrics for NPS and OSAT provided limited context 
• Manual data analysis of open-end survey responses took two months to complete
• Static, offline reporting in PowerPoint that hindered data exploration

After Dimension Labs

• Cut insight review time from ~60 days to under 6 hours—achieving a 100x speed improvement
• Automatically extracted 30+ new themes and topics from open-ended survey responses
• Performed comprehensive emotion clustering and sentiment analysis to assess satisfaction with loading speed, navigation, UI, features, content, and stream quality
• Identified key churn drivers across 7+ product lines
• Created 5 predictive fan profiles to enable near-perfect attribution of feedback themes by fan type

Challenges ‍

Manual Process of Data Annotation

While the NBA collected thousands of open-ended survey responses alongside structured questions, these free-form comments were largely untapped due to the difficulty of analyzing them at scale. The NBA needed a more efficient way to process and analyze the vast amount of fan feedback collected through Voice of Fan surveys.

Their previous approach involved manually reviewing verbatim comments, which was both time-consuming and inconsistent. Analysis often focused heavily on negative sentiment, missing out on insights in the nuanced and positive feedback data. Additionally, insights were presented in static Word and PowerPoint reports, limiting the ability to dynamically explore data and correlate findings.

Limited High-level Metrics

The NBA relied on high-level metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Overall Satisfaction (OSAT) to measure the voice of the fan. While these structured responses provided a broad, numerical snapshot of fan sentiment, they fell short in revealing the underlying themes, topics, and deeper emotions driving that sentiment. 

As a result, it was difficult to identify what truly mattered to fans or to take precise action based on their feedback. The data lacked context, limiting its usefulness for shaping meaningful fan experience strategies.

Solution

Using advanced language models and AI-powered enrichment, Dimension Labs categorized verbatim comments into actionable themes, emotional clusters, and sentiment drivers that were all mapped back to specific product experiences. Rather than relying solely on static metrics like NPS and OSAT, the NBA was now able to enrich every open-ended response with a multidimensional dynamic layer of insight. 

For example, within the NBA App, Dimension Labs created targeted enrichment tied to six core experience drivers: loading speed, navigation, UI appeal, content uniqueness, feature richness, and streaming quality. This automated enrichment meant that instead of manually parsing thousands of fragmented comments, Dimension Labs made it possible to immediately pinpoint feedback tied to specific product drivers such as:

• What are fans saying about streaming speed?
• What frustrations are driving app churn?

Dimension Labs transformed the NBA’s approach for all Voice of Fan survey data by serving as a single pane of glass, unifying fragmented feedback into an interactive, AI-powered data studio. Organic theme detection and emotion clustering allowed the NBA to automatically identify emerging topics and contextualize fan sentiment in ways that were previously impossible. Stakeholders could now explore sentiment, track rising issues, and connect feedback directly to specific game-day experiences or digital touchpoints. All of this analysis includes modern, flexible visualizations to replace outdated PowerPoint reports.

Predictive Analytics Leads to New Insights‍

Each piece of feedback was further enriched with predictive dimensions to help identify potential churn risks and upsell opportunities. These predictive enrichments surfaced as dynamic fan personas—such as the “Frequent Streamer,” “Value-Seeker,” or “Mobile-First Fan.” With this new layer of insight, the NBA could segment and prioritize feedback by audience type, enabling hyper-targeted improvements to the fan experience.

This shift allowed the NBA to move from passive reporting to proactive decision-making. They could now ask and answer previously impossible questions like:

• What content are Classic Fans enjoying?
• Which features would convert a Casual Viewer into a Super Fan?

By transforming raw fan commentary into structured, actionable intelligence, Dimension Labs provides the NBA with increased Voice of Fan coverage, fueling more personalized engagement, reducing churn, and driving meaningful revenue growth.

The Results

Operational Efficiency: Faster Time to Insight

By using Dimension Labs to automate significant data wrangling processes, manual data workloads for analysts at the NBA were reduced by up to 50%. The teams shifted from time-consuming reporting to strategic analysis & planning, increasing their capacity to drive impact across digital and in-venue channels.

Automated enrichment replaced manual comment review, allowing the NBA to quickly identify key themes, sentiment trends, and product-specific issues. What once took weeks to analyze could now be done in hours, enabling timely responses to fan concerns and improving overall satisfaction.

Comprehensive Fan Intelligence

Dimension Labs unified 100,000+ Voice of Fan survey responses into a single, cross-channel view. This gave stakeholders the ability to explore feedback across the NBA App, League Pass, in-venue experiences, and other channels. Added emotion clustering and organic theme detection helped uncover new, deeper context around fan sentiment on these channels.

Predictive Fan Intelligence & Business Impact

Dynamic fan personas and churn-risk indicators gave the NBA new visibility into who their fans are and what motivates them. Teams could identify high-value segments, uncover upsell opportunities, and prioritize actions that would improve satisfaction and retention.

With clearer insight into what drives loyalty and dissatisfaction, the NBA implemented targeted changes that elevated the fan experience. Enhancements to the mobile app, personalized content strategies, and real-time issue detection all contributed to stronger engagement and retention.

Actionable Product Insights 

Open-ended survey responses were analyzed to uncover recurring issues and automatically mapped to key product drivers like streaming quality, navigation, and content. This helped the NBA identify exactly where fans were experiencing friction, and enabled precise improvements that led to higher positive feedback scores and fewer repeat complaints.

Conclusion

Working closely with the NBA, Dimension Labs helped shift their Voice of Fan program from static reporting and manual analysis to a scalable, insight-rich feedback engine. By enriching unstructured survey data and layering in predictive fan intelligence, we enabled their teams to identify what’s working, where to improve, and which fans to prioritize. The relationship has evolved into a true partnership focused not just on reporting what fans say, but helping the NBA take faster, more targeted action that improves products, strengthens fan engagement, and drives measurable impact to their business metrics.