Pedram Padidar – COO, Enteractive.

Personalisation is the new watch word for the iGaming sector as we move into a new era for the industry, with emerging audiences requiring a more considered approach to how we engage with them as players, and we must adapt to their needs – they are our industry’s most important assets. The art of the conversation is more important than ever.

While technology has brought many benefits in scaling CRM activities for our sector (like so many others), it’s also moved operators further away from the players, and removed that emotional connection that’s so important for brand engagement. CRM campaigns via email and SMS can work up to a certain point, but on email you can’t hear someone smile, and emojis add no empathy to text messages.  

It’s why Enteractive has worked with iGaming clients and partners since 2009 to make personal calls to their players, delivering a personalised experience on each and every call. We focus all our efforts on making sure the player feels valued and listened to, particularly with their individual needs, and we’re constantly evolving our product development to ensure we offer a choice of convenient communication channels.

The success of this approach is measurably greater than other CRM practices, with Enteractive now ranking in the top three traffic generators for the global iGaming industry. Moreover, such a personable approach brings life and personality to the brands we represent, building a closer relationship with each player and breeding both trust and loyalty.

Many surveys also support this closer relationship with players. “68% of customers will leave feeling under appreciated”, states the American Society of Quality Control, and what we’ve found is that players not only feel more appreciated by the operators to whom they give their patronage, but they also want to hear from the brands they choose to play with.  

In our own surveys conducted with players, more than half (51%) said they preferred to be contacted by phone, compared to email (13%), SMS (12%), and live chat (24%).

Such personal interaction makes them feel more valued, more cared for, and less likely to leave and churn over. Through our conversations with players, we know that they’re interested to hear about new offers, and are more likely to tell us about any concerns they have – they open up and allow us to get to know them better. This is only possible through our two-way engagement on phone calls.

And since it’s a two-way conversation, we also get useful feedback about what they like and what they don’t like – all incredibly useful insights for our operator partners to take on board and put to good use in improving or adapting their services.

As the sector continues to grow, these player insights become more and more important, providing a barometer on how the audience wants to evolve their enjoyment of iGaming entertainment and where it fits into their lives.

The pace of lifestyle change has been taking place at lightning speed over the last ten years, and consumer habits across multiple industries are changing and affecting the day to day intents of our audiences.

From our point of view, when representing our operator partners directly with their customers, the art of conversation is a crucial part of the skill set for our reactivation agents. It’s imperative that we have native speakers calling from local phone numbers to ensure the conversation has a truly cultural fit and makes the players feel comfortable to have a chat. We’re providing a friendly and useful service, giving players what they want, and how they want it.

All our agents are located in Malta, part of the Enteractive family. They are trained in all aspects of the markets they cover, as well as responsible gambling best practices, accredited by G4, the Global Gambling Guidance Group. Whichever markets we’re operating in for our clients’ benefit, the ‘glocal’ approach is key – we’re a global company, but we interact on a localised level.

We ensure that our agents know the brands they represent and are an extension of the brand, with a full understanding of the games on offer, the bonuses available, and how to engage with the players while respecting their privacy.

As we’ve grown, we’ve developed our (Re)Activation Cloud technology to make the operator’s experience seamless when integrating their player databases via secure API. And as our product development evolves, we’re now rolling out our new SMS-based call-back platform, allowing players to request a call-back at a more convenient time should we contact them when they’re busy.   

Everything is geared up to keep the conversation going and to secure as much good will and interest from the players as possible – it’s what gives us the edge in reducing the churn that our operator clients can suffer due to lapsed or dormant player accounts.

The best part is that the segments that we focus on for our operator clients are the hard to reach lists of accounts that have gone quiet, or perhaps registered but never deposited. These are not audiences that affiliate marketing can reach, nor convert. They don’t respond particularly well to digital CRM practices like email and SMS.   

Without our personalised outreach campaigns for operators, these player revenue streams would remain missed opportunities, and since we only get paid when the players play, it’s a no brainer for iGaming brands to engage our services and increase the number of active players as well as reviving dormant revenues.

As the iGaming sector continues to grow in 2021, we’re looking forward to welcoming more operators from around the world to our Enteractive family. Will you be one of them? 

Pedram Padidar is COO at Enteractive. Enteractive is the industry leader in player reactivation, and the pioneers behind the (Re)Activation Cloud™, building bridges between operators and their players, and ultimately increasing player retention and loyalty by engaging with them in a 1-on-1 conversation.