New competitors popping up, alongside industry titans expanding into new markets, make the competition for share of wallet more crowded than ever. But with customers at their spending limit, companies looking to grow without overburdening customers are faced with a tough question—how do I stand out?
We sat down with Sky Betting & Gaming to learn how they’ve used customer insights to break ahead of their competitors to become the #1 online bookmaker in the UK.
What's the current state of the betting and gaming market?
There's a significant number of online gambling in the UK. There is more online gambling than offline. The digital online space is a key battleground. That comes with it a few challenges and a few opportunities. It's harder to stand out. Barriers for entry and exit are super low. You're not the only shop. Attaining customers is a challenge.
In terms of some shifts and trends we're seeing in the market: there's a large focus on sustainability, really proactive and reactive engagement with consumers of all types, gambling safely within their means. As well as all these macro factors: understanding your customers, their wants, their needs, is more important than ever.
What's your top priority to drive growth?
We're seeing competitors come up on the scene all the time. We're seeing player promiscuity, meaning betters use multiple sites. People have more and more accounts. For us, what we don't want to do is drive growth by getting our own customers to spend more with us. We need them to spend more with their existing wallet, which may be with multiple operators. The goal is to increase share of wallet, not increase overall spend. It goes back to that sustainability. If we're going to own share of wallet, we need to be giving our customers the best experience possible. Hopefully they won't feel the need to go elsewhere. To drive that satisfaction, we are focusing on ease of experience and also want to make sure they feel safe and valued. Then we will drive growth.
The market is in a growth period. How that has affected us as researchers? Demand for research has ramped up significantly over recent years. There's an increased need for breadth and depth of research as well as the rapidity at which you can get those insights. We're largely a digital business. We operate similarly to large e-commerce sites. We are incredibly data thirsty. You've got business intelligence, data teams, as well as research. The maturation of the market has shone a spotlight on the need of increasing details to serve customers effectively and in line with their increasingly high expectations. The market is incredibly segmented. We've got four different online verticals and multiple customer types, so creating propositions that cater to all of these is the main byproduct and most difficult byproduct.
What role do customer insights play? And how are the insights incorporated in decision making?
Customer insights play a huge role in what we do. Two key areas: spotting proactive opportunities. We're constantly collecting data, a lot coming through our insight community with Alida we call Clubhouse. How can we spot new opportunities, problems, pain points, to then take to leadership to prioritize projects. Second: it's a means of validation, proof of concept. We have a lot of creative ideas, but in isolation these are very risky unless we test them with customers. It's very expensive to build new solutions, so the ideal outcome is to do something once and right, so throughout the whole creation process, the customers need to be at the heart of it. That's how we embed customer-led insight across all major projects at the company.
We've had our insight community since 2014. It's grown from a couple thousand to 24,000 members. We've seen growth as a business in parallel. Our community is sufficiently broad and representative. For us to continue to innovate, we need that reliable source of customers to test projects.
Watch the webinar here to hear more of the Sky Betting & Gaming story.
