Q&A: Leading the real-time charge

While the ability to communicate with customers in real-time is a long-term goal of many operators, Sky Betting & Gaming (SB&G) is one firm ready to action its plan. In fact, the sector’€™s ‘Northern Powerhouse’ is currently developing a new platform which will enable it to not only perform real-time CRM functions with players within individual brands, but to do so on a one-to-one customer basis across multiple verticals.

The man in charge of leading SB&G’s real-time data platform is former OpenBet staffer, Andy Gradwell, who is clearly relishing the opportunity to make his mark in what he believes will be a major egaming battleground. “Over time, while being on the supplier side was interesting, I really wanted to move to the operator side and get closer to the customer and make sure what we were doing was exactly what the customer wanted,”€ he says. “€œUltimately, real-time CRM is the future and where I believe other operators will be going in the next couple of years.”

EGR Marketing spoke to Bradwell to find out more about the Leeds-based operator’€™s new platform and why he believes it will provide an important point of differentiation for the company.

EGR Marketing: Tell us about your new real-time data role at SB&G.
Andy Gradwell (AG): My role is going through a slight transition. I am currently head of Sky Vegas product development/experience, but my job title is now moving more towards the real-time data platform, which is the really exciting stuff. Historically, we’€™ve only really done 24 hour CRM. If you are using the basic functionality that both Playtech and OpenBet give you, which can certainly provide some out-of-the-box functionality,€“ it can be very difficult to do something more complex, particularly across multiple verticals. Playtech’s platform, for example, is great if you use it for every single thing like betting, casino, poker and bingo. However, most companies don’€™t which means if you are running CRM across different products it can result in double comping.

EGR Marketing: How has SB&G sought to bypass this problem?
AG: What we’ve been trying to do is rather than consuming everything into the data warehouse as we do today, we are now actually building a platform which will allow us to take real-time data feeds and real-time CRM decisions across the entire portfolio. That in itself, when you combine it with how we currently host our games, gives us a lot of control over the mobile game window that not many, if any, companies across the world have control over. It’€™s a pretty exciting time. The short story is we will be able to message and speak to customers on a one-to-one basis while they are playing a game. In comparison, most companies tend to lose the power of talking to a player once they’ve entered because that goes off to a third-party supplier.

EGR Marketing: So SB&G is taking control of its own destiny with the new platform?
AG: I think a lot of companies took a leaf out of our book as we were one of the first companies to move our front-end in-house within both the Sky Vegas and Sky Bet products. As time has gone on and in-line with when I ended up moving from OpenBet to SB&G, I saw an emergence of people looking at the opportunities of doing it themselves. We are now bringing more and more of that decision-making in-house and making a lot more decisions based on our own destiny. It still means we utilise OpenBet because they ultimately own the wallet and that’€™s how we bonus people, for example.

EGR Marketing: How will you be able to use this new platform across all verticals?
AG: At the moment the only caveat about real-time across more than one product is getting hold of the data. We currently have real-time data available for both Sky Vegas and Sky Casino, so we can do real-time decision-making on both of those products – it’€™s just a case of how quickly we can build the decisions. We’ve got one we’€™re hoping to go live in October which I can’€™t go into too much detail about because it’€™s on a somewhat need-to-know basis. We also have access to real-time betting data, which in time will also mean we can make decisions based on a player’€™s betting behaviour or a decision they are making on-site, such as clicking on particular buttons or moving between certain pages. All of this is more than within our capability to make real-time CRM, bonus provisioning and messaging decisions in real-time.

EGR Marketing: What was your background before joining Sky Betting & Gaming?
AG: I came straight out of university and joined OpenBet as a developer but I’d done a lot of work in and around business information, with regards to how information flows through companies. So while my development skills were probably average at best, it did put me in a good position whereby I understood how that translated into the big picture. I ended up in a business analysis role and then inevitably product management became quite a hot topic and I realised what I was actually being asked to do. At the time OpenBet wasn’€™t using agile at all, so I introduced that to their development process.

EGR Marketing: Do you think other operators will follow SB&G’€™s lead with real-time data?
AG: I think it is inevitable that companies will move from this product-centric world. We’€™ve all been fortunate enough in the gambling sector to be in the right place at the right time – in the past you could have had an ideas dartboard, thrown a dart at it and any of them would have still led to growth. As time goes on it becomes more difficult to differentiate. If you compare the current Sky Vegas portal to what it was 12 months ago, it is completely different. We continued to get customer feedback throughout the whole process so that when we did roll it out, we were already pretty sure the majority of our customers, particularly the high value ones we’d been in contact with regularly, were on board with what we were trying to do. That is key really – the whole customer closeness thing isn’€™t just about talking to customers but involving them throughout the whole process.

EGR Marketing: Where did the real-time CRM idea come from?
AG: When I joined the company we were very aware of the limitations of the OpenBet platform, which Sky Vegas was built on. For all its openness and its ability to do some cool stuff, it was still restricted in terms of abilities when compared to the Playtech platform from a purely casino perspective. So one of the pieces of work we did was offer personalised promotions to players. One of the first projects we worked on was ensuring that while we were communicating with customers through our CRM platform via email, text and push, we also introduced an on-site capability to present players with exclusive promotions. That led to a substantial increase in the number of people who went on to claim promotions and had a massive impact on the engagement of those players.

EGR Marketing: How does that feed into the work you are doing now?
AG: We are taking that same thinking which is about talking to those players on a one-to-one basis. Traditionally, you could come in to the site and if you had an exclusive promotion you would see it when you log in or get an email communication. Now what we are trying to do is if a player is having a bad run of luck, for example, and rather him churn away from our site, we are going to talk to him within the game or portal in real time. So we will make those decisions in real-time as opposed to having to wait until the following day where you might not get the chance to speak to him again. This will be the differentiation people will be looking for because if you can’€™t offer people an exciting experience, why would they play with you? That is what everyone is going to be looking for; finding a reason to play on a particular site.