Opinion: The importance of big data in a post-PoC world

The UK Point of Consumption (PoC) tax is a development that will impact the bottom line of operators and they will need to look at new and innovative ways to reduce costs, increase existing revenue streams as well as generate new sources of income to mitigate the tax risk and remain competitive.

Technology has become the key enabler for any business transformation initiative, and there is one trend that is dominating internal IT discussions – big data. Currently a hot topic across a broad range of industries, big data could prove instrumental in helping the gaming market overcome this latest market challenge.

At the same time, it will be key in enabling gaming operators to become more data driven and to drive process efficiencies, cut costs, increase revenues and to compete more effectively in an increasingly crowded marketplace.

The potential is vast. Most gaming operators collect a raft of high-value data, but so far very few are making optimum use of it. If gaming operators want to embrace big data to drive process efficiencies, improve customer engagements, increase conversion rates or bring innovative new products to market quickly, they need a scalable integration platform.

For many operators though, collecting, processing and transforming data into a format for analysis and smart application is a challenging and expensive process given the increasing volumes and complexity of information coming into the business.

Reaping the Rewards

In my view, there are three key areas specific to any gaming company’s business where having a more efficient and effective data management and analytics strategy has the potential to bring significant benefits. These are customer acquisition; customer monetisation and customer retention.

In the first two, the focus is on growing revenues; in the latter it is more on decreasing customer churn and cost and building customer loyalty via more effective customer engagement.

Take Cheltenham 2015, a tough week for most of the bookmakers who suffered losses across the board. However, all reported an increase in underlying metrics and KPIs such as turnover increases on mobile platforms and record numbers of new depositors and sign ups.

But here is the challenge; bookies now need to make sure their new festival customers make them their bookmaker of choice – and they need to act fast before the punters move to another platform.

For gaming companies, having an effective acquisition strategy in place is about having the technical capability to seamlessly collect the right kinds of data in near real time from multiple data sources, then using it to segment prospects and target them accordingly with tailored offers to keep them loyal and interested.

Tailored marketing

To compete effectively in an increasingly busy marketplace, gaming companies need to ensure they can personalise offers to customers and prospects and deliver these rapidly in near real-time to their mobile platforms at a point when they are likely to buy.

It’s about managing and connecting increasingly granular data about the customer including demographic and psychographic information, clickstream interactions across a range of channels, social media sentiment and direct exchanges with customer care.

Armed with these types of data points and the ability to analyse them quickly, gaming companies can begin to create hyper-personalised offers that steer high-valued customers to the right offers and services at just the right moment.

Such an approach can also help operators achieve their third key goal – the need to leverage data to improve customer retention rates. With churn rates high across the gaming sector and particularly in the new social and online formats, it’s a big issue for operators.

For example, analysing the digital exhaust that players leave online and getting a 360° view of them by being able to integrate all data sets from across the business, will help operators determine which customers should be targeted as VIPs.

Unfortunately, because most don’t have this holistic view of their customers, they are often unaware of their retention rates which can limit their ability to identify which customers deserve their attention.

Solid foundations

Today, it is the PoC tax that is exercising the attention of the gaming operators and driving them to make better use of their data resources. But optimising data should be as much about proactively winning new customers and engaging, monetising and retaining existing ones as it is about reacting to and complying with the latest regulations.

In both areas, having a scalable and cost effective data management capability across the enterprise utilising big data technologies and the Cloud will be critically important in enabling them to achieve their goals.