Adding the “X” to your company
Fintan Costello of Revenue Engineers highlights the importance of hiring a chief experience officer
Our marketing team are in a constant battle with the web team. The IT guys hate everyone and our suppliers leave everything to the last minute. The product managers spend 50% of their energy on internal politics and our support team is always the last to know of any new offers but first to know when it goes wrong.
To various degrees this sums up every egaming operator who, despite their internal issues, has managed to ride out the growth curve of online gambling. As has been well documented, the easy days are over, taxes and regulation are the new norm and consolidation is the only game in town.
With consolidation comes integration, integrating two companies with the initial issues listed above just creates even more internal chaos. So rather than cost saving synergies you end up with desk-by-desk trench warfare.
The solution is C-level leadership creating the right culture by role modelling the right behaviours which is to put the customer above everything else. The most visible way of doing this in any organisation is to create a chief experience officer aka CXO. Despite complaints of C-Suite inflation, the role of the CXO in any modern company is key.
The CXO is responsible for every customer touch point and for an egaming operator would manage at the very least marketing, web, support, product, retention and analytics. Other departments would provide dedicated project management resources to the CXO. All of this would be championed by the CEO with the rest of the C-Suite aligned around the CXO organisation.
By removing silos, making everyone accountable for the same KPIs and putting the customer at the heart of the business, this will be the only way for an egaming operator to adapt to the new competitive landscape.
Solving problems
The CXO will be responsible for introducing a customer centric design-thinking approach to running his organisation. When you strip away the buzzwords, it’s about solving customer problems in an elegant way rather than just adding another menu option.
Then by walking through the customer journey from first to last touch, removing the barriers and pain points that every customer faces. First order of business will be doing away with welcome offers that require a law and math’s degree to decipher. If you have to trick your customers to sign-up you’ve already lost.
Second area is to join up marketing, web and product to give a truly seamless experience across the entire user journey with consistent messaging and a personalised experience.
Next is moving beyond the typical operator/supplier relationship and owning your own product roadmap. This could include building your own slots games for casinos to simply owning your own platform software.
By consolidating teams around a single customer view, areas like customer service and CRM become far more sophisticated and integrated with marketing and product. This enables the ability to solve problems before they get asked or intervene in a customer lifecycle before they are due to lapse.
The other major benefit is that it frees up a huge amount of internal resources and allows the business to also work on the fun stuff like product development, machine learning and all the other new shiny things.
This customer centric approach always wins in the long run as it’s the only way to build brand loyalty and differentiate in a heavily commoditised market.
Time to add the X to your company!
Managing partner of consultancy firm Revenue Engineers, Costello’s previous roles include senior industry head at Google and leading the online marketing departments for PokerStars and Paddy Power.