Customer-relationship experts have advocated for the use of non-monetary rewards in gaming to help retain sustainable VIPs.
Speaking at a session at ICE Vox on Tuesday afternoon, head of product development at Buff.bet Nicolai Milev said the growth of mobile gaming in recent years has introduced gamification and non-monetary reward as a method of retaining punters.
“They don’t approach this with bonuses so much like they do in the casino area. But things are being done in mobile gaming, which is quite new and is called gamification basically”, he said.
“Overall, non-monetary ways make a customer feel satisfaction for what he does. It can be a food basket, it can be trips, it can be appreciation, it can be all non-monetary things, not necessarily a bonus”, he added.
Acknowledging that most operators receive the majority of their income from a small proportion of high-value players, Milev argued that gradually rewarding those loyal players over time was the best way to increase their lifetime value and make them into sustainable VIPs.
He also highlighted the importance of retaining a relationship with VIPs, both to prolong their engagement and to protect them from gambling-related harm.
“As much as machine learning and artificial intelligence are the future, I think the human touch and empathy go a long way”, he said.
However, head of CRM at Betbull Sam Bourne, a fellow panellist, urged operators to use technology to fill the inevitable gap between the number of customers and available resources for offering personal-relationship management.
“It’s indistinguishable, the [responsible gambling] aspect and the technologies that we have. The advancement in predictive modelling, in machine-learning mechanisms – now that we have them, we don’t have an excuse for not applying them on a scalable level”, he said.
