Xtremepush: acquisition take a backseat, it’s all about retention and growth

Unification was the order of the day at the recent SBC Summit Americas, where player first strategies, as well as the ability to develop truly unique player journeys, were central themes in the first of a two-part Xtremepush special.

In this latest roundtable, company CEO and Co-Founder, Tommy Kearns, and Chief Growth Officer, Morten Pedersen Tonnesen, examine the current state of CRM, the critical topic of churn and retention, and just what strategies operators must deploy to remain distinctive and appealing.

SBC News: We’ll start by looking at the industry as a whole; one that is constantly developing. To begin, could you offer your current assessment on the state of CRM and how you kind of envision the future. 

Tommy Kearns: Xtremepush has been in the CRM industry now for 10 years, and we’ve seen the evolution of it all the way from point solutions to cross channel solutions to now.

What we’re seeing is this unified approach that we’ve helped shape in this industry where it’s not just about CRM, it’s CRM encompassing the full life cycle journey, from activation all the way through to engagement, gamification, and loyalty. 

Previously, each of these were separate. What we have done in our business is unify that into one platform stack that enables you as an operator to plug in at the start and bring those journeys to life from day one.

That’s the big shift that we’re seeing in the industry. Transitioning from these point solutions to a much more unified approach, looking at the customer first and understanding that you cannot do this in an isolated siloed manner.

It has to be looking at the customer’s entire journey. To do that right, you must keep your data, your engagement, your gamification, and your loyalty very, very close together.

Morten Pedersen Tonnesen: To keep things very simple, CRM has largely been about collecting data across all touchpoints to build a 360° customer view, and being able to do cohort analysis and subsequent communications on cohorts.

The two main shifts that are happening at the moment are firstly gamification and loyalty, which are becoming even more important. 

Number two is AI and the ability to do much more effective one-to-one communication, customer journeys and everything else. That’s what we’re really seeing transform the industry at the moment.

SBCN: Looking at player churn and raising retention rates, which represent an ongoing challenge, what strategies do you deploy to ensure that Xtremepush rises above the competition faced?

MPT: For us it’s very simple that everything these days needs to happen in real time. Everything needs to happen, as much as it can, in the product. That’s where gamification and loyalty becomes so important. 

It is that before you try to pull players back to the product or get them to come into the product by communication and everything else, that’s still important.

However, it’s even more important now to make the overall player experience inside the product even better than just offering the games.

That’s where all the gamification and loyalty comes in and really gives that extra level of innovation and drive for the players, and puts a new customer experience in place that ensures that you get higher LTVs, longer retention, and players come back.

TK: I think that’s a really good question. As a business, we win on three levels. One is deep capabilities within the iGaming industry. We have a horizontal technology, but it’s very much focused on the iGaming customers. We have that approach and the capabilities to bring that to life. 

Secondly, on the people side, we put experts in the room. Within our team, we are all iGaming experts and have been in the industry from anything from three to 10 years, and some of them have been in it for 20. We bring that to life. 

The last bit is proactive care. We have world class proactive customer care and how we bring those journeys to life from activation all the way through to stimulation, engagement and retention.

To do all of that, you need a platform that can have a 360 degree view of your players from day one. And then you need to be able to do lifecycle treatments on those players.

Basically our real time engine allows you to ingest data, but also process and engage in real time so we can meet the customer in those really important moments, in real time, be it sports betting or in the casino. We stand out through those kinds of main avenues. 

SBCN: Building on that a little bit, and sticking on the theme of players, could you elaborate on just how crucial it is that the experience a player gets is a truly unique experience for themselves rather than something in a more general sense?

TK: I think, again, it all starts at the data layer, the foundational data layer. It’s ingesting their player data from day one, from the minute they visit your casino or sports betting product.

Being able to understand their behaviours, to understand what they did last week, yesterday, et cetera, and then being able to get a preference of what they want and what they don’t like is key. It’s kind of meshing all that together to create that single customer view or single profile.

I think that how we make that uniqueness is through our product and our platform. Understanding that customer 360 degree view, and stitching all the data points so we have a unified stack. 

We’re stitching together a customer profile. We’re also understanding what games they played on any given day. When you start stitching all of that together, you have the ability to understand individual players at scale.

You can have micro segments at a one-to-one level, and you can define and design that up with your operator as you go, and then automate it, which is obviously key for large operators because they can’t do this manually. 

MPT: I think that saying unique is one thing, but what you really want is to give players those aha moments where you’re like, how did they know that as an operator?

How did they know that I was looking for that, that I wanted this part, that I wanted to go in and see that part of the product and so on. 

That’s what you want to do. It’s not unique, but it’s unique in terms of offer. It’s much more about delivering a product that feels like it just knows what it is you want.

I have always, for many years, used Amazon as the benchmark. How do they know that I’m about to run out of a certain product and push me in that direction if I’m buying, and so on. 

That’s what they’ve been good at, and this industry has been lagging. Now we are catching up and are closer to parity in terms of being able to offer that.

SBC: Building on that, we’ll look at things from an operator perspective. To say that there’s a lot of competition in the industry would be an understatement, how can operators truly set themselves apart in this day and age?

MPT: Obviously technology is one thing and knowing the system, and we pride ourselves on delivering a great service. In terms of support, we call ourselves experts in the room, we use it as a saying, which is that we can help operators in areas of utilising our system, building new strategies, developing different ways of engaging consumers.

We are a significant enabler for any operator that takes us on board from a technology knowledge process support perspective, in terms of driving that differentiation, which is key for any operator.

TK: If you look at the US market in general there was a period of acquisition that went on for a number of years and where do you win? You win with acquisition to get the players. Now it’s winning with a product where you’re seeing the consolidation in the market over the last couple of years.

A lot of smaller operators have fallen away, why? Because their product wasn’t good enough to retain the customer. 

In the US market we’re working with all the large tier ones from Fanatics, Betting & Gaming, BetMGM, RSI  et cetera, and what we’re seeing is that the product must be world class for the customer to become sticky. You have to combine a top class product with a top class CRM strategy, and they must go hand in hand.

When you look at the CRM strategy, from day one this needs to have a design of a normal baseline CRM that’s been done over the last number of years, but then you also have to have the gamification strategy and the loyalty strategy within that, and they must talk to each other. 

That’s where we’re seeing massive growth where operators are going ‘okay, it’s not about acquisition anymore, it’s all about retention and growth’.