Joe Coughlin, Co-Founder at London Gaming Company, a company which has been formed in early 2014 by industry veterans with over 25 years industry experience with blue-chip gaming companies. Headquartered in London with a development centre in Slovakia, it is a full-service gaming platform provider focusing on providing excellent marketing tools. Joe will be a a speaker among many experts at the Customer experience transformation discussion panel held at the Eastern European Gaming Summit 2015 in Sofia, Bulgaria. His 2 topics are “How to understand the high value customers? VIP customer relationship management approaches” and share tips how to drive loyalty.

The panel is dedicated to the customer-centric approach in gaming and how to attract & build strong relationships with customers both land-based and online split on 2 groups and 4 roundtables.

EEG: Hi Joe, since you are one of the key speakers of the discussion panel for Customer experience transformation, we would like to have a sneak preview about what the discussion and presentation will be all about. Given the fact that customer acquisition is one of the key elements in any gambling business, do you feel that there is a huge difference between the Eastern and Western European customer behavior?

Joe: The fundamentals are the same but there are definitely regional preferences in games. Graphically rich games from suppliers like NetEnt and Playson are more popular in the East than the West, as a generalisation.

Mobile devices differ slightly too, with a much smaller Apple penetration in the East than the West.  Apple users are proven to spend much more than Android users, so this presents different challenges to operators in Eastern Europe.  The user experience and distribution options are more difficult on Android devices, so the relative cost of acquiring mobile users is higher.

Payment methods always differ from country-to-country.   It’s a critical part of your product.  Our attitude to payment methods is ‘the more the merrier’.

Fundamentally though, there are more similarities than differences between the West and East when it comes to product and marketing.

EEG: Now that we attracted the customer to our gaming activity, what are the key factors that determine that player to spend more and come back and play daily?

Joe: The starting point is to have great gaming content.  There is no shortage of excellent casino and slot suppliers such as Leander, Playson, NetEnt and many more.  But having great content isn’t enough – the competition have exactly the same great content too, so operators can’t afford to rely only on that.

The key to customer retention and increasing spend is to have a full armory of marketing tools at your disposal.  If you have a new slot game, it’s not enough to email your database about it, you should be offering your players introductory free spins or a cash bonus.  If a casino player isn’t playing on your sportsbook, offer them a free bet or maybe discounted odds.  There are dozens of types of bonuses that when used in the right way can be very effective.

We’ve seen great success with loyalty schemes.  Our loyalty module follows the airline model, it has multiple tiers (bronze, silver and gold) and players accumulate points and progress through those tiers based on their turnover or rake.

There are other more basic factors too that apply to all online businesses but is worth mentioning: comprehensive support for payment methods, an affiliate module, a great CRM system that lets you segment players and action campaigns easily and quickly, pay customer withdrawals quickly, have great customer service and support the right mobile devices.

There’s no single formula to maximizing retention and spend, it varies from operator-to-operator and is affected by brand, location, channel and customer demographics.  But to find the right mix for your business, make sure your technology is flexible enough to keep testing until you’ve found it.

EEG: We can certainly say that there is a huge difference between the player that chooses to play online or they players that wants to have fun in a land-based casino, everyone can agree to that, but are there certain guidelines that one should follow to keep those customers feel right at home in their establishment?

Joe: There are certainly very basic principles that unite the online and land-based world, but the most obvious one is to know your customer.  A good understanding of your customer will drive all parts of your business, be it technology, product or marketing, in the right direction.

If you would like to get the unique opportunity to ask all your important questions and learn first-hand details on how to understand the high value customers and manage VIP customer relationships, be sure to attend the Eastern European Gaming Summit in which Jonathan shall give his expert opinion and to benefit from the presented gaming tips and strategies. For 8th consecutive year on 23 – 24 November 2015, Inter Expo Center in Sofia, Bulgaria will bring together under one roof world’s leading figures and companies from the industry to present and outline current market developments and future trends with global vision and focus on the Eastern European market.

Visit the EEGS website here.