Ai-Driven Hyper-Personalized Recommendations for the Betting and Gaming Industry

Empowering the Lobby Manager with personalisation

Casino lobby personalisation has been hovering somewhere between nascent and non-existent for the past couple of years, in spite of genuine strides forward in the tech space with bespoke products built to serve the niche. 

The value of a highly-tuned and personalised lobby cannot be overstated. We all know that the lobby is the hub of any digital casino, seen by every user and responsible for the vast majority of game launches.  

On the surface of it, the concept is simple – make it easy for players to find the games they love to play, whilst simultaneously surfacing the new games that keep players interested and drive so much – how hard can it be? 

What are the blockers?

The reality is more complex. Firstly (and wrongly), the core concepts, delivery and therefore understanding of the benefits of personalisation rarely sit within the operations teams that ultimately govern and manage which games go on the site, and where they sit on the lobby and category pages. 

The tooling that drives personalisation is in almost every case not designed with gaming operations in mind, with many of the standard solutions built for e-commerce merchandisers in mind (at best), and quite often requiring developer-level knowledge of front-end site manipulation to bring in any real changes. 

This lack of agility and usability can create an insurmountable barrier for fast-moving operations teams, all of whom are in a constant cycle of new releases and ongoing inventory management often at a frenetic pace and anything that adds to workload is never likely to be adopted. 

Commercial Constraints

Beyond the tooling and agility barriers are the often highly complex commercial arrangements around exclusivity and supplier coverage on the lobby, which create a constant headache for lobby managers across the entire gaming industry. Finding a way to integrate a personalised element alongside the commercial constraints can feel like a labyrinthian task at the best of times. 

Our insight

We’ve been working with multiple gaming operators over the last couple of years, in constant dialogue with customer experience and marketing teams for sure, and ever more closely with operations teams.  

Hearing these challenges consistently across our customer base led us to understand that a) there has to be a better way to manage both an optimised customer experience that fits with the huge challenge of running a gaming site, and b) embedding personalisation into core operations is the absolute sure-fire way of generating additional yield from the core customer base without needing to ramp up marketing spend 

What’s the solution

Last year, Graphyte launched a product called Intelligent Layouts to do exactly that. The casino product is aimed squarely at solving all these issues in one package.  

Designed specifically for lobby managers and customer experience teams, it brings the best of both worlds, allowing full control over content categories, exclusive and promoted content whilst at the same time driving deep personalisation wherever possible, all delivered through a simple integration to the existing CMS. 

In-built de-duplication technology solves the very real problem of showing the same titles multiple times on the same page, and the inclusion of a mixture of regularly played and new titles across the lobby creates a genuinely unique experience for every player, whether they prefer live casino, slots or scratchcards (or all three). 

Payoff

We have seen in our client base, without exception, that deep personalisation of the lobby is the single biggest driver of core staking to the existing user base, with top-line staking increases of over than 5%. This from a technology that utilises existing CMS and back end platforms, therefore keeping costs to a minimum, and requires no change to the workflow for operations teams. 

Symphony Solutions is happy to have taken part in helping its partner  turn this solution from the proof of concept to a full-fledged product successfully used by betting and gaming operators.