Made to measure

With giants Amazon and Netflix the masters of tailored content, the egaming industry has been relatively slow in providing punters with a personalised experience on mobile devices, although things are beginning to change. Lewis Phillips reports

Log onto the Netflix homepage and within a couple of clicks, you’re watching the latest instalment of your favourite TV show. The streaming provider and other ecommerce giants have mastered the recommendation tool to provide the ultimate personalised experience, but it’s an area and opportunity egaming has yet to fully grasp.

“You can bet your life we think the industry is lagging behind in offering a good tailored experience,” says Noel Hayes, BetBright’s director of sportsbook. It’s a view shared by GVC’s chief product officer Liron Snir, who says very few operators currently have a platform that can present personalised content for customers on mobile devices.

GVC’s brands currently display recent games played, as well as popular games within the customers’ territory. Its apps also support its customer segmentation strategy, allowing them to send relevant notifications to specific groups of customers. But Snir says GVC is only getting started in this area and will be introducing its own recommendation engine in the near future. And on the sports betting side, Onionsack CEO Jonathan Power believes a tailored approach will enhance the customer experience, particularly on mobile devices due to the difficulty of navigating through the vast amount of markets available on the smaller screen. “I think it is time for them to take a look at how they would cut back on the markets on offer based on their own profile,” says Power.

Satisfying needs

Gala Coral took a big step towards providing tailored content for users when it overhauled its Gala Casino site on desktop and mobile earlier this year. Led by its in-house UX and creative team, the new site uses a series of algorithms aimed at giving customers ‘what they want’ – such as relevant games, promotions and bonuses.

Head of Gala Casino, Richard Leask, says the new ‘What You Want’ proposition sets the firm apart from rivals and delivers that all-important cut through in a crowded market. “Taking a customer-centric approach we are giving players the opportunity to pick the bonus they want, to pin the games they want to play and make recommendations based on their playing behaviour all through a simplified user experience,” Leask explains. Once logged in, players see a unique homepage on the mobile app based on their previous experiences and favourite games.

What appears at the top of a mobile app landing page is largely driven by the popularity of certain games, or by the timing of major sporting events that are taking place during the day. But that uses data from all customers and all events, rather than being specific to the individual.

And with operators offering hundreds of games and betting opportunities, recommendation engines are an early step towards offering a tailored experience. But unlike Amazon and Netflix, putting that into practice within the egaming industry appears to be easier said than done.

Snir insists firms don’t need “crazy technologies” to present relevant gaming content in real-time, as most of the relevant data can be pre-calculated and used in real-time. “The data we collect is usually basic information which influences the type of content that is relevant, like country, gender, age etc. Based on these factors you can build a profile of the player and present your next best offer,” he says.

Sportsbook headache

Ladbrokes’ head of business intelligence Damien Evans, says building a recommendation engine for casino and games is a “doddle”. But adapting the same approach for sports betting is proving much more challenging for the firm, with difficulty in knowing how to segment markets and events for customers in a time manageable fashion. “You’ve got about a million different combinations of events and markets so finding a way to boil that down into something you can cut into groups and match to customers is pretty tricky,” says Evans. “It’s the dynamism of it first of all and the grain – how low level the data can go down. The platform that serves up the content on your sportsbook needs to link into the API on the sportsbook. A lot of that depends on how clean the API is but we’re in the process of doing that right now. Also how you manage the simplicity of building a rule that works well enough that matches the knowledge you have on the customer and what events are there so it is a bit more complex.”

Recommendation is an area Sky Betting & Gaming (SB&G) is looking into as well, but following Amazon’s ‘recommended for you’ isn’t a case of straightforward imitation. Andy Walton, head of data at SB&G, believes the personalised tools are far better suited to casino than a complex sportsbook, citing the biggest challenges relating to turnover, frequency and volume of potential opportunities.

“Partly it comes down to the quality of the underlying data and how well the data hierarchy is categorised,” he says. “In a simple example, if you have an event in the Premier League and it’s Manchester United versus Liverpool tonight and then Manchester United are playing in the Champions League and the FA Cup, does the data set allow you to link Manchester United together or not? And when you have complex sports data fed into systems by numerous third parties, and most bookmakers do, I think there’s a big challenge around how well that event catalogue is described at data level. It’s a great challenge and it’s definitely not unsolvable but on the gaming side it’s an easier challenge,” says Walton.

Pros and cons

Betway’s marketing director Anthony Werkman warns that simply copying the Amazon approach is a risky option when trying to build positive relationships with customers. “If a bookmaker suggests a specific bet based on your own previous wagers, customers may be a little more cynical of that recommendation,” he says. “Is the bookmaker recommending a particular market because they’ve had some success from you on that front? There’s a careful line to be walked down.”

Power warns that tailoring sports betting content can have a knock-on effect on margin, particularly if customers are only seeing selections that are of interest to the punter. “It’s a difficult position for the operators, because a lot of those markets are high margin and when they create these new markets, some of them become quite popular,” says Power.

“But from the customer’s point of view, it’s very difficult to navigate your way through a mobile app due to the vast number of markets available.” However, Werkman believes focusing on creating a tailored portal is one way to overcome such challenges, which both highlights the more popular markets, but also offers a route to those less-known sports and markets.

“For example, if a live Dutch football match suddenly becomes the lead event on Sky Sports on a quiet day, then we have to assist the customer in finding the right match and right markets,” says Werkman. “Scheduling is a constant job to ensure we achieve this.”

Limited knowledge around the lesser known sports also presents challenges for operators. Betway has been at the forefront of eSports betting, having become one of the first operators to launch a dedicated site to the vertical and most recently becoming a shirt sponsor of eSports team Ninjas in Pyjamas. But it’s the product the operator struggles with most when looking to tailor content for its customers, largely due to the limited historical data it can draw on. “When we mould our content carousels, we want to make sure that each piece of information is the most sought after for that particular sport,” adds Werkman.

Future adoption

Despite its challenges, egaming firms are realising the need to provide tailored content for its customers as a way of improving customer engagement. BetBright says this is an area it will be focusing on in the near future, and has set out an “aggressive development roadmap” to bridge the gap and improve the experience for the customer.

The operator has already developed a recommendations system called ‘recall’, which is driven by a user’s past behaviour. The feature looks at a customer’s betting history across horseracing and football and compares it against available betting opportunities.

So on a Saturday, the firm will serve a user with a personalised recall reminding them that a horse they backed previously is running that day, for example. BetBright envisages an app where content on mobile devices will be tailored specifically for individual punters, so for example, horseracing fans will see the latest odds on meetings right at the top of the app, as it aims to create what it describes as the “ultimate personalised experience”.

Personalised content and recommendation tools is one of the areas Rank Group is focusing on in the coming months. Christopher Conroy, head of customer data science at Rank Group, says such tools can also help in reducing acquisition and retention costs, pointing to how successfully the services have been used in other ecommerce industries.

“The fundamental reason why you want to deliver personalisation and recommendation is for customer engagement,” he says. “The reason why around half the world is on Netflix rather than other video streaming sites is because they’re so good at it.” GVC has undergone a major third-party push in recent months, as it looks to bolster the content available on its recently acquired bwin.party brands. And Snir says having a raft of games available on its platform is the building block to provide tailored content for punters. “When it comes to slots, we want the variety of content so we can tailor the offering to a wider range of players,” says Snir. “With table games, it is again about making sure we’ve got all the relevant variations.”

So with the egaming industry waking up to the benefits of tailored content and recommendation tools that is so common in other ecommerce industries, the mobile experience for punters is likely to evolve further, and not a moment too soon.