CompetitionLabs https://www.competitionlabs.com/ Gamification for user engagement Fri, 02 Oct 2020 12:39:05 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.5.1 Who moved my reward? An e-gaming fable https://www.competitionlabs.com/who-moved-my-reward-an-e-gaming-fable/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/who-moved-my-reward-an-e-gaming-fable/#comments_reply Fri, 02 Oct 2020 12:04:20 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=5420 If you haven’t been gifted a copy of Who Moved My Cheese you probably have avoided the corridors of the executive suite. The story of rats and Little people caught in a maze of ever-changing locations of cheese; it’s a…

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If you haven’t been gifted a copy of Who Moved My Cheese you probably have avoided the corridors of the executive suite. The story of rats and Little people caught in a maze of ever-changing locations of cheese; it’s a thin parable for the need to embrace and adapt to change in the business world.

The big data world can encourage us to look at customers through the lens of archetypes, like the Hem and Haw of WMMC as either those willing to accept the change or unwilling or unable to do so. As marketing and product managers, we want customers to move to new products – literally the new cheese – and that we know they’ll enjoy when they find it.

So, who moved my reward?

When we introduce inducements like rewards as part of our new product proposition, like the cheese in the maze, we are setting an expectation. We know we are going to have to remove the reward at some stage. And that our customers won’t like it when we do move it.

Should you move a reward at all?

Jackpots, points and rake back have been valuable parts of the casino or poker managers arsenal for decades now, and are very much baked into customer expectations. Changing to formula too much is guaranteed to annoy them, and get you a deserving nip on the hand if you do.

Cheese is finite.

Like cheese, there’s only so much we can spend on a reward and get a return from it. Ideally, the path to earning a reward becomes part of the reward itself – the quest for new cheese in the WMMC world view – and that the process of earning the reward allows the player to experience new opportunities – may be part of the maze they’ve never seen before.

While the overall supply of rewards/cheese might not change, the player’s sense of satisfaction on receiving it will improve with the journey.

We’d love to hear about your experiences in changing rewards – and where it succeeded or just succeeded in annoying customers. In the next in this series, we’ll be exploring how missions and ladders transformed adoption and activity for different games.

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Gamification in Sports Fan Products https://www.competitionlabs.com/gamification-in-sports-fan-products/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/gamification-in-sports-fan-products/#comments_reply Mon, 03 Aug 2020 08:57:45 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=4817 Gamification is transforming industries from Health Care to Human Resources. It is successfully used in health applications from Nike+ and Apple Health through to inbuilt goal setting with heart rate monitoring in exercise machines integrating with the Internet of Things. …

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Gamification is transforming industries from Health Care to Human Resources. It is successfully used in health applications from Nike+ and Apple Health through to inbuilt goal setting with heart rate monitoring in exercise machines integrating with the Internet of Things. 

It might seem natural then that gamification is applied to Sports betting or Sports fantasy. Many gamification techniques already exist in sports in the form of sweepstakes, tipping competitions or fantasy leagues. Punting clubs combine strong elements of social, competitive and gamified techniques, without breaking into out of their niche. 

So if gamification is already used in sports, why are we writing a post about it? Well, there’s one challenge inherent in all sports products that limit their appeal: 

Sports betting, tipping games or tournaments require sports knowledge. 

Lots and lots of knowledge

Sports fans consume vast amounts of information – player profiles, strike rates, yards gained, ages, heights, weights, speed, phobias and fears. They steep themselves deeply in the lore of the game and can often recite the last 40 years of results. Placing a bet requires further knowledge, and often quite complex maths, to work out what represents a good bet.

This places the product manager in a difficult position.
Assuming deep knowledge of a game excludes the casual player.
Assuming shallow knowledge limits enjoyment by a sports fanatic.
Assuming willingness to learn esoteric gameplay and rules, excludes everyone.

As such, we believe the opportunity for gamification in sports is to:

  1. Facilitate the appeal to a broad cross-section of knowledge levels (from near none to obsessive)
  2. Allow the translation of knowledge to action
  3. Let product interactions follow the natural crescendo of a sports event

We will explore these areas in subsequent posts, but if you’d like to start your sports gamification journey, please contact us.

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Gamification – Opinion piece https://www.competitionlabs.com/gamification-opinion-piece/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/gamification-opinion-piece/#comments_reply Mon, 18 May 2020 08:00:41 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=4638 Introduction Talk to anyone in the egaming industry, and they’ll tell you the same story – the golden days are over. Intense competition, responsible gambling scrutiny, aggressive taxes and ever spiralling acquisition costs are making it ever more difficult for…

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Joachim Timmermanns
Co-founder of QuickSpin

Introduction

Talk to anyone in the egaming industry, and they’ll tell you the same story – the golden days are over. Intense competition, responsible gambling scrutiny, aggressive taxes and ever spiralling acquisition costs are making it ever more difficult for operators.

At the same time, operators struggle to differentiate themselves – with the same product, with (sometimes) different colours and themes, and even identical promotions and specials – no wonder many have chosen to focus on acquisition where there is a chance of competing.

I find this paradoxical since, at the same time, consensus says that the greatest value can be gained from customer retention. 

Our industry had a prosperous period that is being challenged right now. The competition has never been fiercer, taxes have never been higher, and acquisition is at its most expensive level right now.

Yet, everybody mostly continues in doing what they have done for many years, offer the same product (in slightly different colours), and put most efforts and budget in acquisition marketing.

Paradoxically, the consensus seems to be that retention is what is most important, however the two biggest drivers of loyalty, product and retention marketing, remain largely unappreciated. 

We can do better

Retention is about loyalty, and the primary drivers for loyalty are a good product, brand identification and relevant marketing. For me, the answer to these three concerns is the same – gamification.

I love games – I love making them. I love playing them. I love talking about them. And I’ve been surprised how little game techniques have crossed into the operator’s main web sites. Let me share my vision for how operators can make the gaming experience central to their entire offering. The ultimate version for operators is where the brand proposition and user experience seamlessly transition into the casino games that the player is coming to play. The disconnect between site and games needs to be a thing of the past, both should contribute to a singular experience. Operators will create an additional layer of gameplay that marries both ends create a deeper enjoyment benefitting both player and operator.

Practical magic

So whats the spell for operator gamification magic? Easy:

Step 1: Game

If you haven’t spent hundreds of hours yourself playing slots and casino games, hire a team that have. The understanding of game mechanics – challenge, reward, incentivisation, rule construction – will drive better customer engagement. Once you’ve hired them, back them with time and budget to make it real. Don’t let gamification fall behind compliance and seasonal promotions – use gamification to solve these challenges.

Step 2: Technology

This is the easy bit. Yes, I know you’ve spent the last ten years battling with technology, and yes, what you have right now probably isn’t what you need. While you figure out what the long-term requirements are from a technical point of view, you can work together with your suppliers to make use of their retention tools in a way that is according to your style and values.

And you can cheat – while at Quickspin, I used CompetitionLabs to bridge the gaps we had in our platform. The CompetitionLabs platform between operator and gaming platform allowed us to build tools which offered the functionality we or the operator did not have. The fundamental advantage CL has is that all tools developed on the CL layer can then be used across all suppliers, simplifying integrations and improving product coherence.

Conclusion

Ultimately it all comes down to the question of how much you entertain the player through your website experience compared to the games that you offer. If the games that you offer are the only real advantage of your website then it is time to make changes. While you ramp up your operations to handle this internally, go out and speak to your suppliers. Everyone is stepping up their game to make your CRM easier and more fun for your players.

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Why should you care about Technology? Gamification at Scale https://www.competitionlabs.com/why-should-you-care-about-technology-gamification-at-scale/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/why-should-you-care-about-technology-gamification-at-scale/#comments_reply Wed, 11 Mar 2020 11:50:56 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=2352 The post Why should you care about Technology? Gamification at Scale appeared first on CompetitionLabs.

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Like most people from ‘The Business’, I used to think that technology was solved by ‘IT’ people. 

The reality is, however, that we need not just to understand aspects of technology because they help us deliver a product to customers, but to a lot of customers the technology was the business. 

The more I scratched, the more technology wasn’t someone else’s problem but very much something I needed to understand:

Capacity

  • The promotion has gone wrong: you spend millions on a campaign, only for the system to fall over when the moment you get customers signing up for it.
  • Perception: customers expect dial tone availability if you aren’t available or worse, you are slow, the negative impression takes a lot to fix.
  • Opportunity: are you ready for 20% month on month growth? And is your platform?
  • Lead time: how long will it take to add capacity? Is that factored into your success plans?
  • Profitability: we assume things get cheaper as we get economies of scale. Right? In the tech world, more can often mean more expensive.

Security

  • GDPR: 5% of global REVENUE fines if you get it wrong.
  • Payments: schemes can cut you off (PCI) if you don’t meet standards, irrespective of a breach.
  • Targeting: what happens when your key customer list, their turnover and contact details get to a competitor? Could this leak through a partner?
  • Personal liability: Could you go to jail? The answer may surprise you.
  • Cost: Retrofitting security is more expensive than getting it right in the first place – partner with people who care about security from the outset.

APIs

  • Laziness or efficiency: APIs aren’t just for integrating with third parties – if you are doing lots of repetitive jobs, an API can help automate it away.
  • Communications: good APIs have documentation and examples, taking the pressure off your development teams.
  • Responsibility: good APIs means you know who to yell at when something goes wrong because there’s a transparent allocation of responsibility.
  • Internal training: shorten the time for onboarding new staff since the documentation describes how the system should behave rather than them trying to guess, means you can scale up your business more efficiently.
  • Quality: ever have a feature that was perfect one day, broken the next? Tested APIs help you maintain functionality between releases.

Data dystopia

  • Data Islands: You can see it but can’t use it: ever get frustrated that you can see segmentation in one system that you can’t use anywhere else?
  • Data Desert: Correlating action to effect: ever wonder why a user was displayed a message? Has all the data leading up to that decision been lost?
  • Data Midden: Is all the data there, just not organised, so you can’t make sense of it.
  • Data Lake (and straw): Is all the data there, but you are unable to process it?
  • Data Catacombs: Is all your data locked away and only available through arcane rituals to the dead?

 

The final reason – or should I say reasons – for getting involved in the understanding of technology is all about delivery. There are important decisions made every day in organisations around build or buy. 

From both the operator and the supplier side, I’ve found that it is incredibly important to understand the details of the decision, rather than just a set of feature bullet points. Some things to consider include:

  • time & scope (It’s enormous, check out what we have in stock for you – and remember, innovation never stops)
  • money (know the real cost and time-to-market, and be sure that development doesn’t start all over again in the future)
  • opportunity (Gamification is here to stay, that’s a fact. When are you ready to leverage enhanced engagement and customer retention?)

 

We’ve designed CompetitionLabs from the ground up to be one of the easiest to integrate platforms available with standard adapters and integration support available for some of the industry’s key players and flexible architecture for plugging in your own. Available in SaaS and on-premises models, CompetitionLabs also encapsulates best practice out of the box with version management, security and API first support as standard.

 

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Today’s customer communication methods https://www.competitionlabs.com/todays-customer-communication-methods/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/todays-customer-communication-methods/#comments_reply Fri, 28 Feb 2020 12:14:59 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=2258 Communicating and engaging with customers is at the heart of what we all do, and this week I'd like to push beyond the immediate website centric interactions.

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Communicating and engaging with customers is at the heart of what we all do, and this week I’d like to push beyond the immediate website centric interactions.

Let’s break it down into a series of criteria that differentiates the when and how: 

Trigger: What is it that initiates the communication/interaction? 

Timeframe: How long between a communication being initiated and it being received? Does it affect customers’ action or perception? 

Truth: Has the truth of the communication changed between it being initiated and the customer receiving it? Another way of turning  

Technology: Is the communication fully leveraging the technology? Is the message consistent with the means it’s being consumed? 

Text: In the broader sense of “textual” – what is the size of the message and likelihood the customer will consume it? 

Website

Trigger: A customer visiting a website is an obvious trigger moment, but customer expectations have moved on since the 1990’s – they expect information to be updated as they view a page. 

Timeframe: There is no gap in communication between a customer requesting a page and it needing to be presented. 

Truth: If a customer is on your web site they are expecting what they see to be “true” – e.g. if they see a promotion as being available, their expectation would be that if they clicked it they would be available. Similarly, if they see their position on a leaderboard, their expectation is that its “correct” (or close enough) 

Technology: Website technologies are changing – they are presenting much richer communication  

Text: Websites can (and do) deliver anything from a punchy message in a banner to detailed descriptions and promotions. It’s often difficult to match the message with the media 

Push notifications

Trigger: A change has occurred – a prize won or a tournament enrolment has opened – the trigger is away from the customer, but usually based around criteria they have preselected. 

Timeframe: The time between a communication has been triggered, and the customer reading can be anything from seconds through to hours or days, depending on when the customer prioritises reading it 

Truth: Customers have a looser expectation of “truth” since they know that they aren’t necessarily reading “current” information. There is an expectation that the notification was true, at some stage, but not necessarily now. 

Technology: Push notifications, even if though they are ubiquitous, are actually evolving. For example, there are ways of “updating” notifications even after they have been sent. The ability to add extra rules and logic without fundamentally rewriting everything is therefore essential in any technological implementation. 

Text: By its nature, push notifications tend to be limited to a message and a single call to action. By accepting the limits

Emails

Trigger: Emails are consistently triggered by the operator  

Timeframe: The time between a communication has been triggered, and the customer reading can be anything from seconds through to hours or days, depending on when the customer prioritises reading it 

Truth: Customers have a relatively low expectation of the “truth” of emails – they can sometimes read them days or weeks after they’ve been sent depending on the account they’ve been sent to. Often marketing emails end up in spam, a reflection of the customers (or Google’s) View of their “truth.” 

Technology: Email technology is well established, but has well-known limits. 

Text: While an email can contain a long spiel and multiple calls to action, the increase in the textual content can dilute the message and decrease the effectiveness. If you know that you have several messages to deliver in an email, how do you prioritise.

Chat

Trigger: Operator sites increasingly have “live chat” which allows a customer to interact with either a robot or a human – shifting between the two depending on the need. Customers are increasingly enjoying the immediateness of WhatsApp and other chat-based interactions. They are predominantly customer-initiated 

Timeframe: Customers expect the interaction to be in “real-time” – that is when they type a question they get an answer in an almost immediate timeframe 

Truth: Customers have a high expectation of the truth since they are talking “with the company” directly. Anything presented is expected to be actionable. 

Technology: Bots are surprisingly well developed with natural language capabilities – operators are still learning how to leverage this beyond standard helpdesk interactions with surveys. Given it is a customer-initiated interaction, there is an opportunity to further exploit the opportunity.

Text: The nature of a chat is “conversational” shifting the register from formal to informal.

Widgets

Trigger: Widgets can be anywhere from web pages to lock screens on mobile phones. The trigger for viewing a widget is when it is viewed – either in the context of a page with other information or with a list of other widgets 

Timeframe: There’s no delay between a widget needing to be rendered and the user seeing it  

Truth: Customers have a high expectation of the truth since its in the context of other things that are true – be it their balance or the weather 

Technology: The context of a widget constrains the communication – by screen size, by technical limitations, by security restrictions on linking to Call To Actions 

Text: The text of the communication is often limited to just statistical or bite-size information 

Conclusion 

While it’s tempting to have communications as a single checkbox on any product evaluation, we can see that messaging changes fundamentally when the method changes. The variations in immediacy, expectations and register give us different opportunities to engage with a customer. 

At CompetitionLabs we interpret the challenge as needing to support a core set of rules for the logic of gamification while providing a toolset of capabilities that allow you to adapt and integrate according to the communications mechanism you choose to use.

We provide: 

  • A universal widget that will enable you to drop into your web site or game
  • A comprehensive API that allows you to retrieve real-time information for use in bots 
  • An event stream that lets you trap and trigger push notifications 
  • A callback mechanism which enables you to trigger email notifications from your CRM 
  • Any combination of the above to allow you to integrate your own custom mix of communication mechanisms together 

Read more about “Why Segmentation Matters”

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Why Segmentation Matters https://www.competitionlabs.com/why-segmentation-matters/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/why-segmentation-matters/#comments_reply Wed, 12 Feb 2020 10:32:03 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=1977 Something we all know – some from hard experience – is that the wrong message to the wrong person is sometimes saying nothing. A lot of what I’ve discussed online has been very much about the message – achievements, leaderboards…

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Something we all know – some from hard experience – is that the wrong message to the wrong person is sometimes saying nothing.

A lot of what I’ve discussed online has been very much about the message – achievements, leaderboards etc. Marketing executives are often cited as saying “I know that I’m wasting 50% of my budget, but I don’t know which 50%” – Lets see if we can at least understand where we are going wrong. 

Introducing the 3R’s

After being so negative, let us look at how we can score segmentation techniques:

Right Person: Does our segmentation technique successfully target those most likely to act on the message?

Right Time: Does our segmentation technique help with understanding the timing of when to deliver a message to the customer?

Right Message: Does our segmentation technique help with understanding the levels of segmentation

Level -1: Broadcast

We (almost) all grew up with this on television and radio – yes, we ended up all singing along to the jingles, repeating the slogans and laughing on cue at the bad jokes, but how effective was it as a segmentation technique?

Right Person: There is no control about who sees a message when it is merely, broadcast out to the world – while media sellers will tell you about the demographics they anticipate, it is a guess. (Score: 0/5)

Right Time: With no information about the individual receiving the message you have, or at best, broad-stroke information, e.g. its 7 am so its probably breakfast time. Probably. Ignore that they might be already on their way to work. And won’t be paid for another week. (Score: 0/5)

Right Message: The ability to deliver a message really suffers with broadcast segmentation since it needs to not offend at the same time as informing people. Its why kids need to be able to repeat car slogans long before they will ever decide to buy one. (Score: 0/5)

Examples: Broadcast Television, Commercial Radio

Overall Score: 0/15

Level 0: Historical Profiles

This is the level most executives will associate with segmentation – a break down of their customers based on historical behaviours, e.g. last purchase time, gender, geolocation and a lot of implied information (socio-economic bracket, likes/dislikes based on age). The info breaks down into several potential target cohorts (groups) typically up to 12 – the limiting factor is generally the ability for people in an organisation to market to the groups and their likes/dislikes. Crucially it is based on behaviours that were true in the past – typically a month ago, a year ago or even the last census!

Right Person: Often organisations report impressive jumps from even quite basic historical profiling – this is unsurprising even with inaccurate profiling with four well-presented campaigns you have a 25% probability of accidentally targeting the right person with the right campaign. With “good” results being anything from 3% plus, there’s often an unacknowledged amount of luck. (Score: 1/5)

Right Time: With coarse groups, historical profiling doesn’t necessarily help with the timing of messaging unless one of the criteria is specifically about time. (Score: 0/5)

Right Message: Historical profiling is often associated with personas which definitely helps marketers customise the message. Given that historical profiling is often mutually exclusive (a person fits in one segment but not another) the right message might still get to the wrong individual (Score: 1/5)

Examples: Targeted letter drops, specialised magazines

Overall Score: 2/15

Level 1: Micro Profiling

Micro-segmentation takes information that is available in historical profiles and expands out the number of categories that it is broken into – into the hundreds. Prominent examples of this sort of segmentation include Facebook and Google whose tools allow you to craft messages against specific intersections of behaviour to enable targeting of very specific messages.

Right Person: Undoubtably micro profiling allows you to identify the right person more accurately, but it is inherently based on historical behaviours. This might result in over-targeting or overexposure, as it won’t take into account changes in behaviour until the next reprofiling exercise, or sometimes ever! (Score: 3/5)

Right Time: As with all historical profiling, micro-segmentation techniques don’t necessarily help with getting the timing right for a message. Micro-segmentation doesn’t have current information (e.g. you’ve just ordered pizza, you don’t need another Pizza Hut ad) (Score: 1/5)

Right Message: Messaging is still primarily coarse-grained with micro profiling – specific messages for specific audiences without sufficient information to change the content of the message (Score: 2/5)

Examples: Classic Facebook and Google ads, Point of Sale Supermarket Vouchers

Overall Score: (7/15)

Level 2: Real-Time Profiling

We’ve all seen real-time segmentation at work on the Internet – browse for a vacuum cleaner, and suddenly you are confronted with a bunch of ads in the correct currency, with the distance to your nearest retailer. Its an amazingly sophisticated trick that seemingly only the most prominent Internet companies can pull off – Google, Amazon, Facebook – on specific (usually their own) content.

Right Person: Although the visual impact of real-time profiling can be dramatic, it often doesn’t take into account when the right person becomes the wrong person (Score: 3.5/5)

Right Time: Undoubtably the timing of messages is dramatically improved – the reason for not receiving a higher score is that real-time profiling usually doesn’t take into account the customer journey – research, shortlisting, purchase, etc. (Score: 3/5)

Right Message: When we researched this category, we were surprised at the lack of customisation of the message – yes, things like price and availability were included but very little customer-specific information (Score: 3/5)

Examples: Amazon in-store purchases

Overall Score: (9.5/15)

Level 3: Real-Time Behavioural Profiling

The ability to change the segmentation of a customer (and messaging, and timing of messaging) must feel like science fiction for many businesses – and yes, the best examples of customising journeys, messaging and timing of messages are best showcased in games. Quests, tournaments and challenges adapt to player progress, statistics and capabilities. A less emphatic example is for ride-hailing companies who have embedded within mapping tools – insight into your behaviour allows them to modify their messaging and pricing according to not just your behaviours but those of the marketplace.

Right Person: An element of self-selection based on behaviours nails picking the right person for messaging – we would note that even companies with real-time behavioural profiling still default to broadcast messages in the case of big promotions. (Score: 4/5)

Right Time: Because gates trigger messages, the timing of messaging is often pinpoint accurate and not excessive – since the real-time behaviour knows that an action has been taken, a message can be withdrawn and the next selected (Score: 4/5)

Right Message: Messaging is still largely pre-defined in this category – pricing for ride-hailing is predetermined (even if algorithmic), and games messaging tends to follow specific storylines without varying incentives etc. (Score: 4/5)

Examples: Online games, Ride-Hailing companies

Overall Score: (12/15)

Level 4: Guided outcomes (Machine learning)

Strap in because this is the ultimate level of segmentation – and nobody is there just yet.

Rather than setting messages and segment, the business person will set the desired outcome or destination that they would like their customer base to get to, or move towards, for example, the adoption of a new feature.

At this level, we would see the customisation of whom to target, when to target, and what to target with, all based on machine learning.

Right Person: Segmentation at this level will ultimately be a segment of 1 – an individual. It’ll be hard to get better than that (Score: 4.5/5)

Right Time: (Score: 4.5/5)

Right Message: Messaging is still largely pre-defined in this category – pricing for ride-hailing is predetermined (even if algorithmic) and games messaging tends to follow specific storylines (Score: 4.5/5)

Examples: TBC

Overall Score: (13.5/15)

Takeaways

As we can see from the different levels, data about customers is crucial to moving to a higher precision of segmentation. It is easy to focus on the quantity of data, but what is also essential is the timeliness of data – the closer to real-time, the better your ability to:

  • Send the Right Message
  • At the Right Time
  • To the Right Customer

Read more about “Customer Communication Methods”

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ICE and wish lists for 2020 and beyond https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-and-wish-lists-for-2020-and-beyond/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-and-wish-lists-for-2020-and-beyond/#comments_reply Tue, 11 Feb 2020 20:18:50 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=1973 Hard off the back of ICE is budgeting season for many of us. I know the agony of walking around and looking at all the new ideas and knowing I can’t have ALL of them! Before we started CompetitionLabs it…

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Hard off the back of ICE is budgeting season for many of us. I know the agony of walking around and looking at all the new ideas and knowing I can’t have ALL of them!

Before we started CompetitionLabs it was the same cycle every year. Get excited. Look at what was in the budget. Compromise with a fraction of what I wanted. Get jealous of a competitor who picked different compromises. Rinse and repeat.

So, what do I wish for now? When I get inspired now, I go log in to CompetitionLabs and try it out – a new games mechanism, a new scoring scheme, a new achievement. Adjust a few things. See if it works. It’s like a genie that keeps granting wishes every time I rub the magic lantern.

The CompetitionLabs engine integrates with any real-time data source and lets me, as a product manager, compose my own rules and notifications, letting me innovate without needing to keep going back cap in hand to the CFO or CTO for more development resources. I can blend in my existing segmentation data or use real-time behaviours to create new segments.

What should you wish for this year? If your CFO is only giving you one wish, I’d be wishing for more wishes with CompetitionLabs.

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ICE Inspired? So am I! https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-inspired-so-am-i/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-inspired-so-am-i/#comments_reply Fri, 07 Feb 2020 07:43:00 +0000 https://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=2350 Three days of the neon blaze, dodgy air conditioning and a blizzard of information and the urge to crawl under a blanket and wait for the room to stop spinning is almost overwhelming. I want to share my three essential…

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Three days of the neon blaze, dodgy air conditioning and a blizzard of information and the urge to crawl under a blanket and wait for the room to stop spinning is almost overwhelming.

I want to share my three essential takeaways from this year first:

  1. The words spread – the year of gamification is upon us – it isn’t just me saying so
  2. E-Sports is now undeniably “a thing” which makes me feel dangerously middle-aged
  3. The opening up of the US and tightening of Europe is a major tectonic shift that was visible through subtle but profound changes from regulator presence to product mixes

The world has changed.

Does this change anything in the CompetitionLabs product strategy? Definitely! What would be the point of going to ICE otherwise? With Gamification programmes popping up everywhere we’ll be investing heavily in our API to make it even easier to integrate CompetitionLabs.

Existing product features such as our scalable Leaderboards and Tournaments fit well with e-sports, and we’ll be looking to showcase their advantages. Our visual Rules Engine has always made it easy for business users to make changes on the fly – we’ll be adding additional jurisdictional awareness features to simplify life for customers.

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Happy New Year -The Year of the Gamification Rat https://www.competitionlabs.com/happy-new-year-the-year-of-the-gamification-rat/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/happy-new-year-the-year-of-the-gamification-rat/#comments_reply Mon, 03 Feb 2020 09:33:40 +0000 http://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=1595 The post Happy New Year -The Year of the Gamification Rat appeared first on CompetitionLabs.

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As the firecrackers subside and lion dances welcome a new lunar year, I need to tell you – I’m excited. 

This is the year it all happens. This is the year gamification goes big. 

According to my more superstitious friends, the Rat is uniquely suited to be the guardian sign for gamification since it matches his personality perfectly:

Industrious and thrifty Anyone who has watched a pet rat knows how curious they are, and they know good fun when they see it. The Rat gamifies his life, with little rewards and perks along the way, at the same time as diligently seeking out a more significant objective – the big cheese feature. If you’ve ever heard me talk about the allocation of rewards you’ll remember my reluctance to throw money about as incentives. Spend money, but spend it well and spend it on things that people value. This is what CompetitionLabs helps you do – work across your portfolio, add value incrementally and optimise promotional spends. 

Diligent One of the founding principles of CompetitionLabs is being able to respond to each and every customer action. I think this is something that the Rat will endorse – the ability to treat your customers as individuals, responding to their unique interaction patterns and responding appropriately with achievements and showing their progress towards rewards. Like the Rat, the CompetitionLabs engine will sniff through every morsel and crumb swiftly and make a decision of what to do with it.

Positive You can see why I’m so excited – the Rat is a positive little creature and likes to spread his outlook around. That’s what gamification is all about – positive experiences and positive behaviours. This is the year to go past the spin (although anyone with a pet Rat can tell you how much they love a spin in a wheel) and giving someone a positive experiences irrespective of the result of a single transaction.

And that’s why I’m excited. This year every cent counts. This year every event counts.

This year every smile matters

This is the year of the Rat

This is the year of Gamification

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ICE 2020 – Things to watch out for… https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-2020-things-to-watch-out-for/ https://www.competitionlabs.com/ice-2020-things-to-watch-out-for/#comments_reply Wed, 15 Jan 2020 09:25:03 +0000 http://www.competitionlabs.com/?p=1591 Well, its almost here – ICE 2020! I always look forward to ICE (and the sore feet afterwards) to get inspiration for the next year, and this year is looking to be even more exciting than usual with everyone’s “Vision…

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Well, its almost here – ICE 2020! I always look forward to ICE (and the sore feet afterwards) to get inspiration for the next year, and this year is looking to be even more exciting than usual with everyone’s “Vision 2020” strategies finally coming to fruition (you just know everyone has a 20/20 project – it’s just too good a name to not use).

This post will hopefully help you make the most of the event, with a couple of my predictions and some “fitness tips” for making it through all the way to the end of the conference.

Things to watch out for:

1.    Engagement – with the industry taking problem gambling more seriously than ever, creating a more immersive experience with the customer is going to be a big trend. That means everyone will have “engagement” as part of their pitch – tips for how to spot the real thing next week

2.    Beyond Bonuses – you can already see this trend emerging with achievements becoming more common – I’m looking forward to how we as an industry innovate this year. Get ready to be inspired!

3.    Photorealism vs Cartoonish – the chasm between the stunning visuals of Yggdrasil and companions and the historical cartoonish look of games will continue but we will start seeing the impact on the rest of the operator environment in terms of branding, messaging and operator level gamification

ICE 2020 Trend – Engagement

Customer engagement is something I care passionately about and this trend is something I find very exciting within the industry. When trying to evaluate whether a product would improve engagement, here are some of the things I look for:

Focus: so the magic bit of engagement is its focus – the customer. Being on the operator side of the equation we can often get very caught up with what we want from the relationship. A sign of a great engagement tool is that they put the customer front and centre of every part of their product.

Measurements and Metrics: OK, so I’m Austrian so I love precision – it is in my blood – but an engagement product that doesn’t let me measure the impact of changes is important for everyone to have. Its also important for the tool to play nicely with my other metrics like linger time, number of transactions and GGR.

Method: this is a subtle one – the more generic a product is, the more it can be bent to your every whim. If it’s a product to boost engagement, then it should have some very firm opinions about where to start, and then be flexible enough to evolve with customer requirements. So what you are after is an offering that, while it can be used for anything, has some strong opinions about how you can use it immediately.

ICE 2020 Trend – Beyond Bonuses

Let me say this now – I love bonuses. I’m not saying that bonuses are going to disappear from the industry, and as a keen player – send me more! What I am saying is that as an industry the pressure on responsible gambling will push us to find different ways of encouraging and incentivising customers in the near future.

Naturally, as an advocate of Gamification in all its forms (tournaments, leaderboards, achievements, missions, quests, capabilities) I would push their use in the move beyond bonuses (BB), but they certainly aren’t the only tool. When looking at solutions, I like to think in terms of the 3B’s:

Brand positioning: in the bonus rush of the last decade we all got lost in the sea of “free” – bets, spins, entries. When presented with the BB world, what does your selection of a particular technique or product say about your brand?

Barriers: while there are obvious barriers that we can put in place to prevent the wrong incentive being given to the wrong customer – spins, wallet size, turnover, geography – what are the “natural” barriers being offered by a BB solution? An example might be automatic increases in difficulty/complexity/scarcity of a reward are good “natural” mechanics to prevent exploitation.

Breadth: something that frustrated almost every operator in the Bonus world was that it sometimes felt the choice was between a sniper rifle and carpet bombing customers. BB solutions should (ideally) offer something closer to the soft gambling world where daily quests of varying intensity are mixed with more immersive journeys.

ICE 2020 Trend – Photorealism vs Cartoonishness

Every couple of years I catch myself looking at a slot or casino game and thinking “well, that’s it, nothing ever will be as visually spectacular as that, game over” and then being joyfully surprised when I see the next generation of visuals.

During my time in the industry, I’ve seen the battle between operators shift from product features to liquidity through to bonuses. During this time visually we’ve come from the dark ages of VGA graphics (remember the old download poker clients?) to current stunning animation and cut scenes. Betting sites have gone from being the discount corner store piled high with anything the operator could sell to carefully curated experiences.

Which brings us to today – the trend towards higher and higher fidelity graphics is now emphatic presenting operators with a choice about which games to promote. The answer is naturally not universal and is very much about your customers and potential customers. Here are a few suggestions to consider:

Attitude: introducing new gameplay is very different from introducing a new game. Slots have a common mechanic (spin, win, feature) that is decades old. Varying too far from the winning formula can have an alienating. Changing both the visual appearance of a game AND the mechanics at the same time might not work with your customers.

Sharp edges: how does the visual style sit with your brand – this applies to both photorealistic and cartoonish game branding. While this was important in the past, I believe it will be even more important as the edges of gameplay spillover (via tournaments, achievements etc) into the rest of your system. Some brands already have a jarring experience between product verticals (casino vs slots vs sports) which deters customers from straying too far from their favourite part of the product, undermining cross-promotional efforts.

Exhaustion: Ever come out of the latest blockbuster movie feeling physically exhausted? Watching the sheer number of visual elements on some games can be as overwhelming as watching an Avengers movie without a toilet break. This by itself isn’t a good reason not to have visually spectacular games, but it is a good reason to think carefully about how you will support your customers and encourage them to continue to come back to them. Incorporating elements of gamification (eg daily quests) lets a customer enjoy the richness of the experience over a longer period.

ICE 2020 Trend – Survival

The wasteland of the last day of ICE is no more – with more people than ever to see, you need to be still upright while the stands are being pulled down around you! After a decade of attendance, here are the CompetitionLabs team’s top tips for getting through to the end:

Get some fresh air: gone are the days of the thick haze of smoke outside any gaming conference, and it is easy to forget how stifling the atmosphere is inside. Popping out for 15 minutes to have a chat is our favourite way of keeping the conversation to the point – you don’t want to be standing too long outside in London during February

Don’t book breakfast meetings at ExCEL: It always takes you longer to get there than you’d anticipate and starting the day swearing at TfL under your breath waiting for the DLR isn’t going to help

Eat: might be obvious but a stash of your favourite snack food is a great way to connect – be it a pack of biltong, TimTams or Hershey’s. And it saves you from joining the 20-minute queue at Costa

Pack light: Carrying your laptop for 3 days straight can feel like you are standing in for Atlas with the world on your shoulders by the end. Not to mention the nightmare of remembering which club you left it in the day after the night before.

Pace: Anyone who has been out with someone from CompetitionLabs will know that we aren’t advocating not drinking. What we are saying (after much pain) is cancelling your first meeting for the next day after the first

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