What does a betting operator’s ideal customer engagement stack look like?

What does an ideal customer engagement stack look like? A key question for operators across the betting and gaming industry that we put to Xtremepush Head of Sales for Sports Betting Victor Sevciuc, who gave the following detailed account.

To start off, any stack you put together must solve specific industry challenges. That might sound obvious, but actually I’ve come across so many instances over the last five years where operators had chosen a solution that may be well-thought of in other industries, but doesn’t work as well as in this one.

As an industry, there aren’t many that come close to sports betting and gaming in terms of the sheer number of events happening in real-time. Bets being placed, deposits (and withdrawals!) being made, odds changing and on and on it goes.

And to be able to communicate all of this with a customer takes a solution that has been there and done it.

So for us, speed and scale are two things that we always come back to. Can the tech stack handle the volume of events firing all the time, and can it receive data from multiple sources and then transfer this data where it needs to go in real-time?

For example, many of the operators we work with require a vendor that supports Apache Kafka. This isn’t something that the average solution can accommodate.

We often talk to operators about the three systems, which are Record, Intelligence and Engagement.

Systems of Record include standard CRMs as well as your backend betting solution (whether that’s supplied by a company like SG Digital or SBTech or built in-house). 

This is somewhere that has large amounts of data being generated and/or collected about your customers. You may very well have a number of systems of Record within your tech stack. We integrate with all of the major solutions, which makes life easier for our clients and also means they can do so much more “out of the box”.

A system of Intelligence then is something like a Customer Data Platform (CDP), which synchronises and sorts all of this data. It also creates a unified, Single Customer View of each bettor’s behaviour to-date. And finally it uses this data to create segments of customers based on shared attributes for advanced targeting, as well as personalised campaigns.

And the final part of the puzzle is the system of engagement. So here we’re talking about your customer-facing messaging channels. That includes the staples like email and SMS, as well as newer channels like push notifications. For me, this is the biggest source of needless wasting of resources.

One of the major trends in marketing technology across many industries, not just this one, has been consolidation. Operators are seeing that they don’t actually need all of the point solution providers that they are paying for.

They can get the same level of performance, and often better, from a single, unified solution which has all of the channels they need and maybe even a few new ones to widen their reach as well. That’s part of the reason we’ve grown so much, and how we’ve built our reputation amongst operators.

Another of our USPs is that we can essentially plug in to any system through our web and app APIs, receiving and transferring data as needed. We have client operators that have replaced entire systems (of Intelligence and Engagement) with our platform. Again, the cost-saving benefits and efficiency-gains are phenomenal.

And where does mobile fit in? We just ran a webinar (available HERE and embedded above) on creating a better mobile betting experience, which we hosted as part of BOSA – Digital.

We made the point that mobile engagement has to be treated as its own entity. You can’t just replicate your desktop experience and expect to see good results. So an engagement solution with deep mobile capabilities is a must-have.

Xtremepush also recently announced details of its new partnership with Penn National, for whom it will provide engagement solutions for the new Barstool Sports betting app.