The eGaming and sports betting industries are highly competitive. Operators often promote free bets and incentives to entice prospects and build loyalty. Much like other industries, these businesses face three key challenges: keeping players engaged, attracting new customers and differentiating themselves from their competitors.

The way to overcome these challenges, operators must offer an experience that’s seamless, personalised and directly addresses their needs to keep players from switching to another operator. In this case, customer engagement becomes player engagement.

Player engagement is a crucial factor in the success of online gaming operators. However, many of these organisations still rely on outdated back-end applications that prevent them from implementing artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools that can detect player trends and create personalised gaming promotions. AI-powered experiences can drive greater engagement with a brand and build brand loyalty among players.

To stay relevant and competitive in this fast-paced industry — where many agile, tech-savvy startups are popping up almost daily — organisations must invest in new technology and ways of working to keep up with the changing times, safeguard their existing player base and acquire new customers.

Safe Gambling

As the gambling industry continues to expand, there’s a growing focus on promoting responsible gambling practices and ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements to protect players and maintain the industry’s reputation. For example, in 2023, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport made some significant changes to the Gambling White Paper. As a result, operators are now required to follow additional restrictions to ensure safe gambling practices. This is aimed at reducing the risk of financial penalties or damage to their reputation.

This means it has become more challenging for operators to generate revenue due to the new thresholds and checks that are in place. As a result, providing exceptional customer service and player experiences has become increasingly important for gambling organisations to scale, acquire new markets and remain compliant.

VIP Gambling

Operators focus on ensuring compliance with safe gambling regulations, while also identifying VIP players and increasing the player engagement. In line with the guidelines mentioned in the UK white paper, operators aim to maximise revenue generation by leveraging AI to understand their VIP players’ previous histories, preferences and dislikes — and promoting relevant products that align with their desired customer journey.

For example, if a customer usually plays online slot machines, offering free spins or the opportunity to play a different game with free spins would be an ideal way to keep them engaged and satisfied. The organisation can also use this opportunity to promote new, diverse player plays within different online games helping to contribute towards increased net-gaming revenue.

In general, operators gather data on their customers’ historical activity and store it in a data lake. Then, they use AI-powered tools to determine each customer’s lifetime value.

This helps companies map out customer journeys and identify opportunities to increase customer engagement and revenue. By leveraging all available data points, companies can incentivise customers to take actions that lead to greater revenue and engagement, such as offering rewards for completing certain activities in different games.

Seasonal Demand

The gambling industry offers customers (both active and inactive) the chance to place bets on major sporting events. As these events cater to a wider audience, they generate additional demand that organisations need to prepare for to ensure that service levels are maintained, and customer satisfaction remains high.

Examples of such events include horse racing competitions as well as other sporting events like the World Cup or the Super Bowl. Due to the volatility of the traffic, this puts enormous pressure on planning and forecasting teams. Interactions might come from new players inquiring how to cash out or place a bet, alongside the regular interactions from frequent players.

AI and Automation in the Gambling Industry

The integration of AI in gambling has emerged as a prominent market trend within the industry. As the gambling sector adopts new trends and advanced technologies, AI has become an indispensable tool.

With the transition from physical to digital spaces, live dealers powered by AI are now replicating traditional gameplay and interacting with players in real time. AI is revolutionising the gaming industry by analysing player behavior and influencing game outcomes.

Moreover, AI-powered chatbots are replacing human customer service representatives and analysing player behavior to enhance support services. Finally, AI technology is addressing the issue of problem gambling by collecting and analysing data on playing patterns, deposits and outcomes to detect issues early. With vendors’ increasing adoption of AI and its numerous advantages, the market for AI within in the global gaming industry is set to grow significantly.

Personalised Player Experiences

Much like popular streaming services, which present multiple watchable shows and movies for the consumer to browse through, current gambling operators want to offer a seamless and personalised journey — as quickly as possible — so that consumers can transact and place a bet.

It’s crucial to ensure that any games or free plays promoted are relevant to the user to prevent them from becoming bored and leaving the app. This will help to improve the overall user experience and encourage them to stay longer.

Technology to Meet Evolving Needs in eGaming and Sports Betting

The eGaming and sports betting industry faces multiple challenges — player engagement, data analytics, customer experience and monetisation. To keep players engaged and increase their lifetime value, gaming companies can create personalised customer journeys by leveraging the Genesys Cloud™ platform.

Genesys Cloud Predictive Engagement uses AI to analyse and proactively engage customers in real time via automated or agent-assisted chat, or make personalised content offers to drive the best next step in their journey. Leveraging Genesys Cloud Predictive Engagement allows operators to increase player play, prevent abandonment and lower the cost to serve — all while improving their customers’ experience by understanding player behavior patterns and triggering precisely timed action.

Providing prompt and effective customer service is crucial for any operators to maintain a positive reputation and retain its players. Genesys Cloud allows operators to automate and streamline customer service processes, which helps gaming companies respond to player inquiries and issues quickly and efficiently.

Additionally, Genesys Cloud Journey Management provides an end-to-end solution for customer-centric operators who need to visualise, measure, monitor and optimise customer experience, employee experience and business performance. This solution allows operators to focus on the customer’s entire journey as they seek to achieve a goal rather than optimising single interactions at each touchpoint.

To address the issue of problem gambling, operators can use the inherent speech and text analytics capabilities of Genesys Cloud to collect and analyse data within customer interactions. Through such analysis, operators might detect issues early and take proactive measures to address any potential problems.

This approach enables operators to act ethically and responsibly, promoting safe play on their platforms. By prioritising the early detection of signs of vulnerable gambling, operators can act accordingly and ensure that their platform is a secure and trustworthy environment for its players.

To address industry fluctuations in demand, Genesys Cloud Workforce Engagement Management provides operators with a tool to anticipate, formulate and supervise agent schedules, allowing for optimal resource use without compromising customer or agent experiences. Furthermore, Genesys Cloud Dialog Engine gives operators a way to mechanise and direct interactions away from the contact centre if they don’t require human intervention. This reduces the burden on contact centre agents during peak periods.

Explore the capabilities you need to create the most value for customers, players and employees in the “2024 Contact Centre Buyer’s Guide.” And get key questions to ask when making technology buying decisions.