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Most businesses deal just with customers. Plural and generic.

Great businesses, on the other hand, strive to deal with the customer. Singular and unique.

It is not an industry secret as such. But it is easier said than done, or ask any CEO of a mid-level company. Conventional customer relationship management (CRM) hasn’t yet progressed beyond the clusters of customers, or what is known as buckets in CRM jargon.

The need to deal with each and every customer in a customized manner is also vital in the gaming and gambling industry, where the customers are getting smarter, more diverse and – let’s admit it – spoilt for choices.

Enter Smartico

Smartico, a Ukraine-based technology company offering innovative new online solutions in CRM and gamification, does not promise to solve this problem explicitly. But its products could help in understanding what a customer – every singular, unique customer – expects and needs from a business.

So what does Smartico do to disrupt the existing CRM and marketing scenario in the gaming sector?

Let’s hear directly from Sergey Kobitskiy, CEO at Smartico:

“Our CRM automation, enriched with a comprehensive Gamification Platform, together they create a winning combination. We also know how to personalize and optimize the communication to the user based on his or her brand or any other parameters, for example, VIP level or favorite games.”

He further elaborates that the idea is to create a one-stop shop that offers modern marketers all the handy tools they need in real time. He goes on to list the details of his CRM one-stop shop:

• It will have the ability to engage in real time
• It manages all marketing resources in one place
• It will have the ability to analyse data in real-time on the sport
• It maintains a secured solution, which does not need to store any personally identifiable information (PII).

Origins of the Company

Smartico was founded in 2018. Over the last three years, it has built a robust technological platform and a clear business model. Apart from Ukraine, it now has offices in Bulgaria and Israel as well. Here Mr. Kobitskiy tersely summarises the company’s origins:

“An unpredicted sequence of events brought the right people with the right technical skills, product and operational knowledge together and an idea was born to make Smartico a reality. After a short time a seed investment was in place to start the development process that took more than a year before we could accept the first customers. Now, when we have well established products and a clear business model, we’re opening a race for round A fundings to extend our operations to different verticals.”

In a nutshell, Smartico offers a unique CRM and marketing product with built-in Gamification module, affiliate marketing system, and real time business intelligence (BI) tool. The product can be integrated into any online gaming or gambling platform.

Since it involves working with multiple platforms, who will take care of the legal aspects? Here Mr. Kobitskiy quickly clarifies the company’s position:

“We only offer the extension for the client’s platform. We don’t offer games, or odds for sports. But the operator can promote any of these through Smartico. Our Gamification module allows the end customers to buy free bonuses, free spins or anything the operator might want to offer. We don’t offer any bonuses or free spins, but the operator does. We work with brands that are under the strict regulations of the UK, and consulted compliance lawyers and passed their audit. But we don’t have any limit on jurisdictions…. That being said, it is of course the operator’s responsibility to follow the guidelines of the corresponding regulator and comply with the criteria and rules of the jurisdiction when producing creative materials or providing bonus offers.”

What Works for Smartico

The engines that drive Smartico CRM are the Gamification module and real-time BI tool. Any online CRM platform across industries will benefit from the gamification module. It focuses on an important, but often-overlooked aspect: reducing pressure on the customer support staff.

Mr. Kobitskiy explains further.

“The Gamification Platform that we offer is not limited to any industry and can be applied in iGaming, Ed-tech, Fin-Tech, Banking, Retail and any other online business. We have successfully created many setups for our customers with Online Casino and Sportsbook operations, including Missions and Achievements, Leveling, Tournaments for Casino & Sport, Shops etc. It makes players interact more  with the features, self service in the shop and thereby relieve pressure from the support teams.”

The Smartico team take pride in their technological acumen and the quality of the product. It is quite visible in the CEO’s words about the BI tool. He goes long into the technological details of the software. Here is a quick summary of his version:

“Our BI is based on a very innovative technology called Apache Druid, and it is tightly connected with every asset and every module we offer across the platform. The Druid provides low latency (real-time) data ingestion, flexible data exploration, and fast data aggregation. All of which empower the BI is to provide the operator with quick analysis of the data from the campaigns, gamification or other modules in the platform.”

Here comes the original question back again. How does Smartico help online gambling and gaming businesses to handle every single customer in a unique way?

The CRM automation by Smartico, backed by Gamification module and BI tool, will come very close to it, if not completely achieve the objective.

To put simply, it helps the businesses to approach the customer with the right kind of message, in the most likely format that he or she engages with, at the most optimal timings and with the most suitable offers.

Well, it is in fact much more complex than putting simply like this. With Smartico, perhaps it is easier done than said.