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Delta Award Winning Story

PokerStars

How PokerStars Integrates the Player Voice to Drive Global Brand Strategy

Success Metrics

4x faster time to insights over traditional methods

Access to ~57,000 customers for enterprise-level research approach

15x higher response rate compared to previous methods

Overview

At PokerStars, customer centricity isn’t just a tick box. Through a flexible, consultative approach, the Marketing Insight team ensures players' voices are at the heart of everything they do. In a competitive market which changes weekly, and a global regulatory landscape that PokerStars, part of Flutter, take incredibly seriously, these communities power these insights.

Flutter, a global leader in online gaming and entertainment, through an enterprise agreement with Alida listens to over 50,000 member voices across brands with communities. At PokerStars, flexible, multi-market communities, named Team Stars, bring the voice of poker to life.

Poker as a social game, naturally facilitates “community”, and PokerStars – with huge fandom across the world has a rich player community. When Team Stars was set up six years ago, it offered a platform for that community to become part of the research team and be in the room when key decisions are being made.

Team Stars has reached fame levels in the business and connects with hundreds of diverse colleagues – from product owners and UX designers to marketers, and senior leadership. It’s been a huge driver in shaping player experience, evaluating ideas, and responding to change. And as it continues to grow, they’re exploring new ways of using Team Stars to support testing, live events, concept development and anything else that needs real voices behind it.

Program Goals:

Integrate player insights across the entire organization
Build trusted, collaborative relationships with players
Use player voices to keep shaping what the future of play looks like

Business Opportunity

To achieve their goals, PokerStars needed something that could adapt, scale, and evolve, and the community has become exactly that. Communities are live across 9 key markets, and regularly hear from the voices of 1,000+ members per market.

Given language barriers, research might often default to doing a lot of quantitative research (mostly surveys), but the Alida tool has allowed the team to deliver insight to more colleagues in interesting, innovative and creative ways.

Solution

The Team Stars community has become the go-to platform for fast, flexible research across markets and topics. Compared to other internal methods, research can be achieved 4x faster through Alida and receives significantly higher response rates (15x higher).

As the Marketing Insight team use the platform in such a hands-on way, they’ve been able to open up new ways of understanding players that would have been difficult or impossible by other means. This includes:

Early access testing
Offering Team Stars members the exclusive opportunity to sign up to pilot test new features. The team used Alida’s forums to create a branded experience for ‘Ace Testers’ to connect with the product team directly to provide specific feedback on brand new features only available to them. The product team were able to spot bugs and make improvements before full launch.
Live event feedback
At major live tournaments, surveys capture real-time feedback via QR code to improve event experience, understand event expectations, and even test and launch new side events.
Managing change
Supporting the collaboration between PokerStars X Sisal (Flutter owned Italian brand, with a rich heritage in sports and retail) as the partnership unlocks a new poker/sports platform to players. By reaching out to members who were dual account holders of both brands on Team Stars, they were able to test the customer journey and communications strategy.
Creative and campaign testing
Quick reads, message checks, and visual concepts are all tested with real players who understand poker culture and can instantly tell brand and marketing teams what resonates and what doesn’t. They even cast a real member in a TV ad!
Operational and CX feedback
From onboarding to payments to broader customer journey challenges, they’ve used the community to stress-test what’s working and what’s not.

Thanks to using the Alida community strategically to support the big business challenges at PokerStars, these are just the top examples of where there has been huge benefit from leveraging player insights.

Results

Earlier this year, Team Stars really proved its value and displayed the speed and efficiency the Insights team can deliver. With the rise of AI and other disruptive technology, executives and business leaders were curious about how players feel about these trends and needed answers fast to impact critical planning.

The Insights team was able to quickly deploy a multi-language community survey across five markets, asking members to submit their answers directly to the CEO. They received 394 responses in just 20 minutes. The ultimate impact came on Day 2, with a final number of 1,800 responses, when the data was delivered alongside a compelling video showreel.

In a uniquely impactful moment, a player's emotional video sharing fears that AI could “destroy the spirit of poker” humanized the data for the executive team. This demonstrated the team's ability to achieve direct executive impact through the speed, scale, and authenticity of community feedback.

Six years in, the community has grown into a central part of how PokerStars understands players, shape products, test ideas, and make decisions. It’s fast, flexible, and deeply human - which feels more important than ever.

The Team Stars community offers:

a direct line to real players
the ability to create small, meaningful moments of insight
and a space to test, learn, break things, fix things, and build better experiences

Player feedback makes businesses connected and resilient. Through the careful guardianship of the PokerStars insight team, it has supported a research culture that feels modern, honest and genuinely player-first.