Q&A: Crispin Nieboer on Hills' plan to go it alone

Anyone who has kept a close eye on William Hill’s perhaps overstated fall from grace over the last year were unlikely to have been surprised by the operator’s latest disappointing financial results. H1 digital revenues declined 3% year-on-year while profits fell by a third.

But for all the negativity thrown its way, the company can’t be criticised for lacking a response. Hills has made some radical changes to the business in recent months, including the sacking of CEO James Henderson, a comprehensive restructuring of its online team, plans to develop a new back-end platform and the recent £15m acquisition of gaming technology specialist Grand Parade.

With Hills’ share price tumbling, 888 and The Rank Group recently announced a £3.6bn joint-takeover bid – an approach the operator has twice firmly rejected. “The group has a strong team to deliver against our strategy to grow our digital and international businesses so we strongly advise that shareholders take no action,” chairman Gareth Davis said.

EGR spoke to Crispin Nieboer, managing director of William Hill Online, to find out whether recent changes to the business are having the desired effect.

eGaming Review (EGR): How has the recently restructured Online team settled in?

Crispin Nieboer (CN): The first four or five months has been about focusing on the team and introducing a new structure. That has gone well and the team has settled in well. There are still a couple more people I want to strengthen the team with, and there will be announcements coming on that, hopefully within the next two or three months. There is now more commercial focus and we’ve brought innovation from being without the P&L divisions to inside them, which has led to innovations becoming live more quickly and being more commercially oriented. And I think the teams are much more aware of the ROI on their cost base than they were before.

EGR: In which areas are you still looking to strengthen?

CN: The UX team seems pretty good now. When I started, we were seriously lacking in UX and we’ve since brought in a good and strong team. There might be some fine-tuning but things seem to be in good shape and they have really delivered with the Euros on the sportsbook mobile app. As you know, we currently have an interim COO in Steven Reid who is a really great stalwart and is giving me a lot of assistance at the moment. But that is an interim role and I’m hoping I will be announcing a permanent replacement for him in the next month or so.

EGR: Why did bonus abusers have such an impact on revenues this past year?

CN: Bonus abuse evolves with technology as bonus abusers and hackers seek to find ways to abuse systems. It’s an ever evolving problem from which operators need to keep finding new solutions, so I don’t think it’s something which has been going on for years that we have just woken up to. What did happen last year was we saw an increase for a few reasons, such as out-of-date business processes, while some of the technology tools that worked for us previously were no longer proving effective. In terms of fixing it, it is really around having a single customer view with our new data warehouse, fixing those technology tools, bringing in a new supplier and product with Featurespace.

EGR: Are the changes you’ve made starting to have a positive affect?

CN: Yes, but there is still a way to go. There are essentially two elements to bonus abuse; single and multiple account abuse. I think the area we will really need to focus on is the multiple account bonus abuse which impacts businesses like ours in two ways. You either have a hit on your sportsbook sign-up bonusing, where your affiliate sign-up bonuses get abused by people getting round single account protections, or it comes from MSS customers finding ways to set up new accounts multiple times and out-smart you on your trading. The improvements we will see will be those in margin and also in more efficient bonusing.

EGR: How is everything going with the launch of your new UNO data warehouse?

CN: The MVP is out already and it’s a huge piece of work. It doesn’t have all of the data in it that we need – it is around 75%-80% there – but it has all the important data and we now have to fill it out. Then we need to think about how close to live we want the data to respond. But we already using the data and UNO to fire off both our internal BI and also our outbound CRM. So it is already being heavily utilised.

EGR: Will this be a major point of differentiation with other operators?

CN: This is part of good housekeeping. Some businesses are simpler than ours and for them data warehousing isn’t such a complex challenge. The sheer number of back-ends, suppliers and volume of customers we work with makes our data warehousing a bigger challenge than most. That is something we need to get right. The areas of innovation here are really around how you manage the UX and how you integrate it into your outbound comms. Those are areas that will be important to us but I wouldn’t want to pretend it’s going to change the world for us P&L-wise.

EGR: You’ve admitted too much focus was put on Trafalgar to the detriment of the wider business but how has the new front-end been working so far?

CN: The main area I’d point to is the speed and quality of releases within our sportsbook over the last three or four months. Now that we own control of that UX, we are able to get stuff out of the door much faster than we ever were before. Last year we did two releases in the first half and the first half this year we’ve done seven, as well as around 115 sports web releases. But it’s not just the volume, it’s the quality. If you look at the feedback from our customers, our net promoter score improvement and our app store ratings have moved in a fantastic direction. Also, the improvements to the team and the Grand Parade acquisition will strengthen that even further.

EGR: How are you changing your marketing to ensure you obtain the right customers?

CN: We’ve made a lot of minor improvements but there is still a lot to do. We are going to carry on with our focus on ROI management, spending more time looking at mobile over desktop, expanding internationally, making sure we don’t overspend in above-the-line things that don’t drive return, but that we go after new areas of online media spend where we might have fallen behind. This includes areas like programmatic and retargeting. It’s also about ensuring, from a bonusing point of view, that we compete to win back customers we’ve lost and introduce loyalty and retention-based bonusing without giving the house away.