Reputation and trust in online gaming
Word of mouth and user recommendation are the best ways for online gaming operators to enhance their reputations, a panel of industry experts and operators agreed during the Reputation Matters briefing hosted by VeriSign in London last week.
WORD OF mouth and user recommendation are the best ways for online gaming operators to enhance their reputations, a panel of industry experts and operators agreed during the Reputation Matters briefing hosted by VeriSign in London last week.
The panel included Peter Nolan, customer operations director at Sky Betting and Gaming, Ronan Tighe of user experience consultancy Foviance and Ged Carroll, director of digital strategies at Ruder Finn, and was moderated by eGaming Review editor Jake Pollard.
The audience was made up of operators such as Betfair, PartyGaming and Unibet, and focused on how operators could improve their reputations and what factors influenced users in a world where social media, connectivity and word of mouth meant negative feeling could be communicated more quickly than ever before.
Online gaming scores worst Net Promoter Score
Recent research carried out by YouGov found that online gaming had the worst Net Promoter Score (NPS) of all industries surveyed by YouGov. The Net Promoter Score asked how likely users would be to recommend a company on a 10 point scale, and then splits the answers into ‘promoters’, ‘passive users’ and ‘detractors’, awarding companies a score calculated by subtracting the number of detractors from the number of promoters.
YouGov found that detractors massively outnumbered promoters, leading to a Net Promoter score of -27, with 45% of the sector’s customers falling into the detractor category. Online gaming as a whole had the lowest range of scores of any sector, which showed how little differentiation there was in how users viewed the industry.
The event was introduced by Martin Mackay, general manager and vice president EMEA for VeriSign, who said trust was vital in an industry where players had a vast array of choices. Security was the factor that enabled online gaming companies to win and retain customers, Mackay said: “If the players have the perception that an operator doesn’t guarantee security of data in the products it offers, that can have a massive impact on that operator’s ability to grow.”
The importance of new customers
Foviance’s Ronan Tighe mentioned operator features such as Betfair’s ‘Refer a friend’ for its iPhone application as a good example of how a good reputation can be built. “You’ll trust a brand much more if a friend recommends it,” he said.
But with novice gamblers such a key market for many operators, the gambling industry needed to provide these potential customers with as much quality information to help them make informed choices in the products they decide to use.
At the other end of the spectrum, Tighe highlighted the importance of trust and security to the experienced gambler. “If you have £10,000 in an account you are going to want to ensure your money is safe. And if these VIP gamblers leave your site, it will cost you money,” he said.
On a practical side, Sky Betting and Gaming’s Peter Nolan described some of the community features Sky Bet had recently implemented, such as the setting up of a community for SkyPoker where users could sound off and debate at length about issues that were important to them.
“Our declared objective is to give customers some influence. Some of them used the community to raise concerns about the legitimacy of software. We’re well regulated so are very confident of our position, but when the formal answer was just not getting through, we set up a new area – Area 51, where people could talk about these issues. This quickly became the accepted place to vent steam and for conspiracy theorists to chat. But what’s interesting is that they are still betting with us,” Nolan said.
Although much of the discussion centred around the UK, delegates and panellists agreed that security is a more important factor in countries where online gaming wasn’t as mature. Tighe said: “we have found that security is more of an issue in our research in Italy, Spain and Turkey. Users are actively looking for signs of trust.”
The rise of social media
Customer engagement, the availability of quality information for novice gamblers and the ability to target specific users such as women with relevant information and features were all described as key factors in helping operators build stronger loyalty and value from users.
The adoption of social networking features would keep on playing an increasingly important role in how operators could enhance their reputations, with Nolan saying Sky Bet would continue to develop blogs and further community features to foster more user-generated content and comment.
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While regulation would continue to play a key role in how the industry was perceived, Ged Carroll said the rise of social media and broadband usage will mean operators “won’t be competing against each other. Instead they will be competing for people’s time in a wider entertainment context where users decide how they want to spend the free hour that they have in the day.”
For more on the event, go to: www.reputationmatters.co.uk