Delivering a more engaging player experience

ambling Insider talks to Dobromir Mitev, CEO and Founder of Dench eGaming Solutions on creating additional value through optimisation and automation

GI: Hi Dobromir, great to catch up. In the past year and a half, you have been developing the Dench Core platform and Giselle V2. How do you plan to position your company in the gambling industry and make inroads into the B2B sector?

We founded Dench eGaming Solutions with the clear view that we will be competing with some of the big names in the industry. This pretty much motivated us even more to prove we can build a fully-integrated gaming platform with a strong focus on the optimisation of critical operational and marketing activities going beyond the conventional set of functionalities.

Since establishing the company, through the architecture and the actual development of Dench Core and Giselle V.2 we have always tried to design processes and features in a simple and practical way. We have been dealing with operations for quite a long time and all of the functionalities we have designed aim to address areas which have been overlooked for a very long time, such as lack of diverse bonus and campaign offerings, customer retention, churn and operational transparency. All of these seem to be very problematic and offer significant potential to improve revenues.

We believe that the unique combination between Dench Core & Giselle V.2 on one hand simplifies basic day-to-day operational processes and on the other hand makes the way operators interact, entertain and reward their players more sophisticated.

GI: In your opinion, what challenges do new operators face when entering the online gaming industry?

Even though the industry is maturing, it is obvious that most of the new operators and white-labels rush into investing heavily in the acquisition of new players on brands built on legacy technology, which offer very little control over the player journey.

What happens is that most of the newly registered players tend to churn after the first deposit due to a disappointing experience. Unsatisfied customers generate poor revenues and then they churn. This small amount of revenue is invested again in acquisition campaigns with generalised “one size fits all” offerings, which further skyrocket your acquisition costs.

Then things get even worst. The lack of operational transparency and clearly designed payment and gaming processes, compounded by insufficient real-time reporting data, sentences new operators to misguided business initiatives involving high repetitive bonus costs which decrease the chances of long-term profitability.

With Dench and Giselle we are specifically addressing problems around the operational bottlenecks and the optimisation of marketing budgets. The more we talk with operators, the more we realise that consolidation of resources plays a central role into the build-up of a successful brand.

GI: You place great emphasis on the consolidation of functionalities and bridging the gap across different teams. What is exactly the driver behind it?

Consolidating all operational activities under one roof and structuring the whole data set in terms of player behaviour, habits and preferences allows all your different team members to share the same customer insights and collaborate on deeper and more personalised initiatives.

Medium or large companies face the problem of operational gaps where marketing, operation and bonus people are trying to solve the same problem using different parts of the product puzzle. Lack of fast data integration and the usage of a number of third party tools are blocking the successful execution of more personalised and engaging experiences. Having a constant and immediate access to aggregated and calculated customer data allows operators to automate bonus campaigns, change things quickly and measure results effectively. Hence, it provides everyone across the organisation with access to the same actionable data and creates experiences that are more authentic and relevant.

GI: There’s a real focus in the gaming industry to deliver a more personalised and relevant user experience. How do you think operators can create more intimate communications with players to enhance loyalty?

Personalisation requires a deep understanding of the customer, and this should come with certain structure in the way we explore and study customer data.

In order to spice things up we believe that in order to affect a player’s behaviour, retention efforts should be triggered in real-time, therefore we have invested a serious portion of our resources to build our features using full AI automation. Allowing operators to create long-running and automated user journeys based on pre-defined actions triggered by players’ behaviour becomes an integral part of a new and immersive player journey.

GI: How can technology help operators to cultivate long term relationships with their customers?

The need for insanely large acquisition bonus incentives has been well rooted in the industry where game data has not been available to create a better player experience.

Big data, automation, and AI started to become common terms used at board meetings as operators realise that players change from session to session, and so should their marketing incentives. By adopting and implementing AI-powered solutions, brands can easily spot ideal audiences based on their betting and depositing patterns, allowing them to influence customer decision-making and automating the most suitable bonus offerings.

Through our experience, we have seen that it is not just marketing teams that drive the change. Ideally, a combination of stakeholders from marketing, product development and BI teams are required to get the projects up and running and monitor the right implementation. If they are not equipped with the right tools and instruments then the setup of really engaging and meaningful campaign could be a nightmare and measuring the actual impact could be irrelevant.

Marketing teams are starting to target the types of players they want with increasing precision and adapt how they structure bonus terms, pressured by the increasing impact of legal frameworks. We have recognised the static environment of bonus distribution and inability of the operators to communicate in real time, therefore now running an ad hoc campaign to someone who has been unlucky with three hands of blackjack in row can be turned in great opportunity through dealing the fourth one on the house.

GI: Apart from personalisation, there is also a growing demand for a more gamified experience, how will this play out in the industry?

A well-implemented gamified product should be built on solid and responsive back-end infrastructure, which successfully works in concert with new front-end technologies in order to deliver a more innovative feel and look.

We believe that this kind of player development will lead the industry into a situation where players can be more adventurous, encouraged to complete missions, while playing their favourite casino games.

In order to do so operators have to decipher player behaviour, spot the right opportunity for cultivation of a certain gaming habitat and also challenge the traditional player with more relevant and personalised incentives.

GI: What’s next for Dench eGaming Solutions?

We will be launching a number of new brands over the next couple of months and we will stay focused on the delivery of our third product, which will significantly improve the user experience, and the way players interact with product verticals. We will stick to our initial concept of building features in the context of AI, implementing process and algorithms to drive full automation of the customer journey while extending session times and increasing loyalty.