Retention software for the online gambling world

Finding and managing your next VIP:

DataSprint is a software as a service tool specialising in retention. Our operator clients regularly approach us to help them with their most important customers their VIP’s.

Their ‘issues’ around their management of VIP’s range from the promotional: ‘are my VIP promotions driving real value?’ through to the strategic: ‘How do I define a VIP?’ to the tactical:’ am I spotting VIP’s when they visit my site?’

Each operator has different needs but VIP identification and management lie at the heart of their needs.

We have created a process that has resulted in strong success for our operator clients. This process has enabled us develop an innovative and effective way to identify VIP’s and to facilitate the ongoing management of VIP’s.

With every new operator, we begin by distilling the initial issue down to the essence of his or her concern. We look to understand their perception of what constitutes a VIP for their business and why. We start with questions focused on how they currently measure their business, their measures for success and the daily, weekly and monthly metrics that drive their activities.

In our experience, most operators focus their metrics on the outcome (gross win, net win, net, cash, deposits) without analysing and leveraging the drivers that generate the outcome the operator is focused on. This means that marketing teams use blunt rather than sharp promotional tactics to deliver a result. Blunt because the promotional activity either ends up bringing spend forward, rewarding players unnecessarily or worse still grooming players to expect regular promotional incentives. This is particularly true when it comes to the operator’s most important players: their VIP’s.

Once we have asked the above questions our discussion moves on to more qualitative aspects. We ask the operator to clarify how they classify VIP’s and why they chose that method of classification. We use a few closed questions to determine what makes a player important to the operator’s business. This helps us analyse the operator’s mindset and bring to the fore any opportunities that may exist which the operator is not exploiting fully.

Our questions then move to the practical operational level and we use DataSprint to assess how the operator’s database is managed in terms of player segmentation and how that drives their marketing activity and business reporting. Again, this often brings to the front opportunities for maximisation. These early opportunities identified by DataSprint tools allow the operator to engage in quick win tactical activity, which can take place. This information is provided in a visual manner not dissimilar to Google Analytics. The idea behind DataSprint tool is to provide the operator with actionable data. This actionable data takes the form of lists of customers for the business to focus their efforts and attention on. The software presents lists customers that need promotional activity and so on and so forth. Essentially the tool is a very concise view of your business and your VIP’s so that your business can move from the doing and stop the wondering stage to the doing phase.

Next we begin the process of player segmentation. We use DataSprint’s software customer transactions to group their customers into behavioral segments. This is important as it helps define how and why VIPs play at the operator’s site. Once this is done we use these ‘behavioral’ segments to create new metrics. New metrics are key, we need them to be able to identify and influence behavior. DataSprint also create a tracking and monitoring system that helps monitor player behavior to prevent VIP attrition or lapsing. Once this has been completed, we work with the operator to train the team and set up the new processes. This is essential as it helps to build a mindset within the business, which is focused on using quantitative data to understand and influence player behavior.

The marketing resources in our operator client’s teams have seized the opportunity as it provides them with more creative space to initiate and deliver campaigns, which are more interesting to the player and reduces the hum drum nature of their existing campaign activity. In all of this DataSprint uses templated solutions to allow the team to operate and manage this with limited resources.

And that in a nutshell is how we think online casinos should identify potential VIP players, and work on keeping them coming back.

Michael Braga is a director of DataSprint a Software as a Service tool focused on improving Profits, Customer Conversion and Customer Retention for their clients.

www.datasprint.uk