Driving change through data

teven Pimblett, chief data officer at Betsson, offers his take on transitioning to data-driven business

Strategic alignment
In your strategic statement or strategic benchmarking, data is classed as a pillar or an asset. At Betsson we have five big ideas and one of them is to be data-driven. Why that’s so important is because obviously any culture or business transformation needs investment, and if you’ve got a place at the strategic table, your CEO backing you and your exec team supporting you, that’s hurdle number one really. If you haven’t got that you’re always going to be viewed as a department that doesn’t add the value that it needs.

Drive the culture
It’s ok to have a great data strategy and it’s also good to be able to have solid insights, but actually how do you drive that across thousands of people across the company? We’re trying to drive the culture to make sure there is a continuous improvement mentality. So find out what is to improve, find out the hypothesis, conduct the experiments and measure and act again. You’ve got many people who are very much of the mindset: ‘I’m doing what I’m doing, how do you help me?’ So then it’s about bringing it back to the actions, measuring those actions to prove that it’s adding value to their KPIs, which gives them benefit, and then you can go through that continuous improvement cycle.

Align success to business
At Betsson, it’s a standard is all about a growth funnel and growth hacking through that. I’ve made sure my team are very much aligned in terms of objectives, targets and outcomes regarding the success of all the various business departments. The last part of any customer funnel is resurrection re-activation – bringing re-activated customers back into the top of the funnel. You only want to bring the valuable customers back.

Measure capability and focus
We more or less do a self-maturity module. I really just put together a view on where my capabilities were against three pillars: maturity, priority, focus, and I’ll give us a score. I started to look at the focus areas, which highlighted the areas where we should invest, in year one because any transformation happens over a number of years.

Measure and share success
We leverage the fact that we had web analytic data where we could see people dropping out of the website just literally trying to log in. We could see that some of our forgotten password emails weren’t getting delivered on time. What did we do? We worked with the business to improve the on-site experience – a better designed user experience. We worked with our technology team to make sure that our emails were delivered faster and better. What difference did that make? We got 3,500 more customers through the cycle and 90% less complaints. So we were able to measure the impact of the actions and highlight the team that took it as superstars.

That engenders that spirit of win-win, and we then get all the teams coming to us, asking us to give them insights so we can win together. That’s how you get scale through an organisation.

Big data
In the last four months we actually built our data lake – it’s now fully operational, which means that we have all our different data sources intergraded into a single environment. So that’s every web view, every email sent to a customer, every transaction across sportbooks. It’s designed to answer the questions that the business has never been able to answer, which is what’s the impact of my campaigns on certain customers?

Single individual view
The mythical single customer view to many companies is: I’d love to get a 360 view of our customer so I can better understand them and extract more value from them. This is just one example of visualisation, where we could correlate how our customer base was moving between our brands. We are targeting people that have left one brand, doing a lookalike comparison and making sure we put the right next brand in front of them. So it might be as easy as re-targeting through banners or actually even through notifications on the site of Brand A. So our goal there was to increase multi-brand penetration.

Steven Pimblett was speaking as part of a webinar titled: ‘Transitioning to data-driven business’, part of Clarion’s Gaming Leaders Webinar Series