SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
As the technology available to businesses offers ever more potential, the task of managing digital resources continues to become increasingly important, but also significantly more complex. We spoke with Mario Ciabarra, CEO of continuous product design specialist Quantum Metric, to discover how betting and gaming operators can drive this ongoing change effectively and gain the maximum benefit from their investments in tech.
SBC: How have you seen the way digital experiences are built and optimised change over the last few years?
Mario Ciabarra: I remember when digital was part of the marketing team because they had nowhere else in the organisation to live. Fast forward just 5 years, and now we have CDOs, product organisations and more to help better facilitate the coordination across multiple functional areas to create, iterate and optimise digital experiences.
The best organisations do digital best with a very simple focus, they centre the discussion not on marketing, nor product, nor tech, but the customer. What are the customer’s needs? How can we help them succeed in this part of the journey? That’s how we’ve seen teams win: obsess around the customer.
At the same time, experiences have also gotten more complex. We are no longer talking about one customer journey through one channel. There are numerous channels and ways for customers to connect with digital brands today. And each channel is expected to meet the customer where they are in their experience. The expectation is that the mobile experience doesn’t have parity with the web experience, but is optimised to meet the unique needs of mobile users.
What this complexity translates to is that the need for efficiency and speed are more critical than ever before. Digital brands are challenged to drive exponential growth despite new disruptions and potentially leaner budgets. This leaves less room for mistakes and drives the need for a simple and consolidated way to see the customer and understand their needs.
SBC: Are there any industry-specific challenges faced by technology teams in the sports betting and gaming sector as they attempt to develop more efficient working practices?
MC: A big challenge facing operators is how to scale their data, teams and processes to work together in an efficient agile way, while also navigating new and ever-evolving regulations. In the UK, the recent White Paper published by the Government suggested additional regulations that would require operators to build more safeguards for players to ensure that they have a clear understanding of every betting action they take. US operators can also expect to see these types of player protections come up as more states legalise sports betting.
In addition, competition is incredibly fierce with similar product propositions across markets, a constant stream of competing promotions, and new operators seeking to disrupt in new markets. This means gaming brands need to have an understanding of every micro-experience within their customer journey and be aligned across the organisation on how to best identify and prioritise digital needs.
Working with gaming brands in both the US and UK, we’ve seen how a small issue can impact the entirety of the customer relationship. It’s critical that these organisations can move quickly and efficiently to retain customers and out innovate competitors. As more gaming brands look to navigate vertical integrations and the market continues to consolidate, being able to understand the unique needs of every customer will be key to achieving market dominance.
SBC: What role should analytics play in helping digital teams to identify their most important issues and distinguish them from their most resource-intensive problems, allowing them to work more efficiently?
MC: Digital organisations have data coming from multiple sources across their tech stack that they then need to piece together to create a comprehensive picture of their customer experience. This takes precious resources and time away from actually implementing fixes and optimisations. With every member of an organisation also having a stake in digital – that means more outside opinions and escalations influence what is being prioritised and not all of it necessarily has an impact on the business or customer. In fact, our recent survey of digital leaders found that on average teams are wasting two months on outside escalations.
Analytics should simplify this data web – helping digital organisations to understand not just what is happening in their experience and why, but how it impacts the business and most importantly, the customer. Digital teams don’t need more analytics. They need help getting to answers and driving business impact with greater speed and efficiency.
SBC: Are new technologies such as generative AI the key to more efficient work practices and freeing up additional resources for revenue-generating projects, such as product development? Or could they prove to be just another skill shortage area that brings new problems?
MC: Technologies like AI hold a lot of promise for how we can continue to advance the UX and UI of analytics platforms. Today’s Quantum Metric’s platform leans on AI to support automated alerting of top KPIs to help digital teams sift through anomalies that don’t need their attention and the ones that do.
As we think about applications for generative AI, the goal is to build a balance between investing in new technologies that can enhance efficiency and making sure those new tools and features are accessible and usable for team members at every level. In the same survey, I mentioned before, we found that it takes an average of a month for new team members to onboard and be somewhat proficient in analytics tools, and even then 47% of digital leaders see less than half their teams as true experts.
As we bring in new technologies like generative AI, it needs to be a guided and tailored approach that enables any user to find the answers they need and easily align across teams. Without the right guidance, tools like Gen AI run the risk of recreating the silos and data disparities many have worked hard to break down.
And without a doubt, we are already seeing a shortage of skilled labour in Gen AI. At Quantum Metric, we’re accelerating our team’s Gen AI experience through a week-long hackathon that has already yielded real product enhancements. I believe this is how organisations will stay ahead, not through a large new labour pool, but through retraining over the upcoming months.
SBC: What would you say is the number one thing digital leaders in the sports betting and gaming sectors should keep top of mind for the rest of this year?
MC: Every experience matters. With competition so fierce and new promotions landing in player inboxes daily, all features and functionality need to be seamless for the user. If the experience isn’t seamless and intuitive, customers will leave. This is especially the case for competitive onboarding, where instances of single friction on this flow can result in drop-offs of up to 60%. During major sporting events, we see sessions increase in excess of 50% and new users increase by over 20% – these are critical moments to build customer loyalty and you only have a small window of time to convert these players.
It’s important to also remember that every player matters. We are seeing more and more operators focusing on attracting the recreational player and retaining the seasonal influxes of casual players, instead of solely focusing on high-value customer segments. The key to success is to go back and understand every micro-journey and be able to serve an experience that offers the right blend of personalisation, content and promotions to keep players engaged.
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Quantum Metric is a sponsor of SBC Summit Barcelona, the global betting and igaming conference and trade show, which takes place on September 19 – 21 at Fira Barcelona Montjuïc.
Click here to find out more about Quantum Metric’s services and to arrange to meet the team in Barcelona.
