Insight: Mecca's mobile overhaul in seven steps

Last month Mecca Bingo rolled out a new fully responsive mobile site as its digital revolution picked up pace. The almost two-year process was designed to offer users greater personalisation while also integrating Mecca’s mobile offering more closely with its online and retail channels.

In this extract from the latest issue of eGR Mobile Intelligence, Rank’s director of customer experience Caroline Grindrod talks through the strategic process that led to the new site.

Step one: Identifying the problem

Rank identified the need for a better mobile product back in 2013, and in doing so also uncovered a more fundamental problem with the way it treated its mobile channel.

“When the mobile site was first built around five years ago, it was absolutely right to get something out there because customers wanted to play on mobile,” Grindrod says. “But as it became the norm, we never aligned those channels quickly enough. It became its own silo. It was like a completely different website, and not part of the same brand.”

Rather than simply rebuild the mobile website, the operator began to explore ways in which it could bring all its channels in line and offer consistency across mobile, website and retail.

Step two: Finding the right partners

Rank initially began exploring the possibility of carrying out the entire project in-house, but decided that it needed to enlist outside expertise for a project on this scale.

It had already worked with several third parties on various projects, including Mkodo which hosted its mobile website and iOS native application. But Mecca wanted greater control over its mobile assets, so decided to build the front-end in-house using third parties in Eastern Europe and India for additional development work.

Step three: Optimising the UX

Mecca’s old mobile offering struggled to give users the type of experience they had become accustomed to across other mobile services. Grindrod admitted many users found the old site “complicated and cluttered”, and it simply lacked much of the functionality found on desktop.

“What we did was just strip it all back and say, what are the core journeys that customers want to do? We found it was to find the games they wanted to play and get straight into bingo. So those journeys we really simplified,” Grindrod says.

The homepage was built modularly, and includes an algorithm which will move bingo to the top of the display should it notice that a customer primarily plays it.

Step four: Branding the UI

Because of a lack of coordination across brands, Mecca’s website had begun to lack its own tone of voice. The firm’s creative director sifted through feedback in search of a way to reclaim that voice and create an engaging UI which didn’t impede user journeys and could also boost retention.

The solution, Grindrod says, was most succinctly defined as “Fisher Price meets Apple”, which meant maintaining accessibility while giving the site a new personality.

“We’d gone through lots of prototypes and throughout that process the whole brand lost its personality – it just went really clinical. We had to ask ourselves how do you bring back that personality but keep it slick and easy?”

Step five: Optimising for omni-channel

The new mobile offering could not stand separately from Mecca’s other channels, and the firm was keen to learn from previous errors and allow mobile to maximise the value of the firm’s brand heritage.

“Before you had an operations team that ran desktop and an operations team that ran mobile. If you looked at the user across everything it was completely different,” Grindrod says.

“What we proved was that customers liked when things felt the same, so you gain trust within the brand for customers to play on mobile, because they understand it is part of a bigger organisation. They didn’t just think: ‘You’re this tiny site who wants my money. You are actually part of this big organisation which has lots of heritage.'”

Step six: Companywide integration

Grindrod’s team is responsible for both the Mecca and Grosvenor brands, and says that some of the principles learned during the Mecca development will be applied to an upcoming Grosvenor responsive relaunch.

“Grosvenor we still need to build, Mecca needs to start gaining momentum, and start hitting the KPIs that we set for it so we get the return on investment,” Grindrod says.

Step seven: New platform and the future

The next focus will be on the platform migration Rank announced earlier this year. The move to the Bede Gaming platform was made with customer retention in mind, and will also increase flexibility and speed in integrating third-party content.

“Our focus now will be on how to transition the whole thing. I think we’ve been talking about it for a year and it is not far off now. At some point they’ve got to take a cut of the website and replicate it over,” Grindrod says.

This is an extra from an article in eGR Mobile Intelligence issue 21. To read the full article click here