Gaming

At the recent EGR Live gaming event Jamie Barnett, Head of Gaming and Shilpi Dahele, Gaming Consultant shared a 16 step guide to establishing the optimum user experience on mobile. Their findings were based on what they have learnt to date from various projects delivered by Foviance and internal research. Here is a snapshot of what they discussed:

1. Develop a mobile strategy:  ‘Mobile’ is more than a buzz word. First, confirm exactly what your mobile users want. Undertake research with punters and players to help develop a clear and well informed strategy.

2. Develop a measurement framework: A measurement framework focused on ROI will enable you to apply resources in the right areas, based on what drives value for your business

3. Understand player/punter attitudes, expectations and behaviours: Do appropriate user research to identify attitudes, expectations and behaviours of players who use your mobile offering.  This will allow you to target relevant customers who are currently not a mobile user, as well as improve your product offering

 4. Understand motivations and triggers: Understand routine tasks by knowing what happens before, during and after the event. This is important so possible engagement can occur at the earliest and latest points of the process. 

5. Understand barriers and act against them: We found the strongest barrier to mobile betting was the fear of security. This can easily by alleviated by providing security features and visible clues to reassure the customer. Understanding all barriers to mobile betting and gaming will help you refine your offering and marketing strategies.

6. Evaluate/validate current mobile offering: As user experience professionals, we always advocate evaluating your proposition with real users to validate your offering. Understand what works, what doesn’t and what improvements from a users’ perspective should be made to the mobile site.

7. Evaluate competitor offerings: Understand what works well on competitor’s offerings and what doesn’t work well. Understand what tasks can be completed with ease and what tasks causes confusion. This will help you to get the best out of what they do, whilst improving where they fall down.

8. Develop consistency across platforms: Customers tend to get disappointed if  functionality is available on other platforms, and not on theirs. Our advice, offer the same functionality across all mobile products, therefore delivering a consistent customer experience.

9. Keep it simple and functional:  The most popular mobile betting sites are the ones that are both simple and functional. Simplify logins, limit registration to the minimum required fields and provide only relevant content to avoid unnecessary noise and time-consuming task completion.

10. Provide integrated support for ALL key tasks: As well as keeping the mobile offering simple and uncluttered, ensure there is still a level of support to enable users to complete all key tasks.

11. Provide feedback where connection failure occurs: Service failure is out of your control, but reassuring your user and being helpful remains in your control. At minimum provide an SMS alert to the user to confirm their bet has been processed.

12. Mobile should resemble the web version as close as possible: Keep the colour coding, terminology and navigation as closely aligned as possible. Customers tend to prefer familiarity to your brand and how your current website operates.

13. Target existing customers from other channels: Try including any of these initial steps to get people to use your mobile offering. Launch mobile-only offers and promotions, send bespoke email campaigns about mobile gaming or add a mobile CTA on the current site’s homepage.

14. Capitalise on the impulsive and social nature of mobile betting: Work on triggers, timing and message. A great way to do this is to send SMS alerts during important matches/races or placing adverts on typical resources and triggers.

15.Extend you CRM: Collect information and develop a profile on your punters, then alerts can be executed in a timely manner – great for impulsive betting where punters act fast and intuitively from an alert.

16. Keep one step ahead of your competition: Fully understand your customers, keep talking to them. Understand their immediate frustrations and expectations, be more customer centric and ideally build an 18 month strategy plan, using both customer feedback and your business requirements.

Jamie’s slides from his second EGR presentation: UX Measurement Strategy of Continuous Improvement

Jamie Barnett, Head of Gaming and Shilipi Dahele, Gaming UX Consultant at Foviance, will be presenting  and running workshops on acquisitions and retention at this 2 day summit.

The 6th Annual Online Bingo Summit will supply businesses with the critical intelligence and tools needed to win new customers, retain high value players and open up new markets. The event is firmly established as the leading meeting place for the Online Bingo Industry bringing together over 300 Online Bingo industry experts for two days of business critical intelligence,networking and discussion.

Held at the Victoria Park Plaza in London, the agenda  has been split into 4 key areas:

1. How to attract the next wave of high spending new customers
2. Retaining your most valuable customers and defecting the opposition
3. Differentiate your site, how to stand out in the market place
4. Entering and dominating lucrative new territories

EGR Live for the eGaming industry offers:

• Updates and insights into the industry’s emerging trends including ways to make them work for your business
• Practical advice on need to know topics including licensing, regulation and fraud
• New opportunities in emerging markets and how to make the most of them
• Ways to enhance and grow your business by sourcing innovative and cost effective new solutions

Jamie Barnett, Head of Gaming at Foviance and Shilpi Dahele User Experience Gaming Consultant will be looking at how companies can develop a UX measurement programme to support a strategy of continuous improvement. Based upon best practice from other sectors and how some of the larger gaming companies, more dedicated to customer experience, are focusing their current UX strategy. They will also be providing a 20 point step by step guide to establishing an optimum user experience on mobile.

An intimate gamification workshop hosted by leading gamification experts, including Guy Stephens Senior Consultant at Foviance, who will be discussing the gamification of customer service. The full day with explore how public and commercial brands can leverage the power of play to increase customer activity, build loyalty and broaden and monetise assets. Other areas of the day include:

• How to use play to engage your audience and encourage sharing
• Case studies on good and bad efforts that make successful gamification
• The specific gamification potential for your product or service
• Practical tips on gaming mechanisms, designing solutions

By Shilpi Dahele

As a gaming consultant, I often have to register to an abundance of gaming websites for client work. At the time of writing this blog post I am due to conduct a project for a well-known gaming client, so one of my tasks was to register to a range of betting websites.

The thought of filling out lot’s of forms is certainly not an exciting one and the experience can be a fairly mundane one. Anyhow, I began filling in the registration form fields for one such site and as expected (and hoped) it was a straightforward and standard process. Read more…

In January 2011 Foviance will be opening the CRM track at one of the largest events of the gaming calendar, the ICE Conference in London. Our session will be entitled: ‘CRM and Loyalty in the Gaming Sector: Examining the Current State of Play’.

For the session, we have chosen to conduct research using a panel of more than 200 players and punters in order to better understand how they think organisations should be focusing their efforts in order to deliver improved CRM and loyalty.

On a similar note and to ensure that our clients get the best out of the research, we have chosen to let them set the agenda and tell us what three questions they would like answered by the players and punters, so that we can include them in the research.

We will collate all the questions, group them appropriately and then build them into a survey which our gaming consultants will then conduct among our panel of players and punters.

The research will form a significant piece of work, comparable to that which we would typically carry out for our gaming clients. Therefore we encourage our clients to put some real thought into what they’d like to gain from the research that might help with the shaping of their CRM strategy.

At ICE we will be presenting the generic results from the survey, however as a follow up we will also be the offering the opportunity to all our clients to sit down in a one-to-one meeting to understand what players and punters said about their organisation specifically, and to understand how that feedback compares to our averages.

So, if you’re representing the gaming sector why don’t you send across your three burning questions that you’d like answered to help to inform, design and assess your CRM/loyalty strategy to Jamie Barnett Or if you wish to discuss it in ore depth, call contact me on 0845 054 6500.

This article was written as part of the Foviance December 2010 newsletter

In January 2011, Foviance will be opening the CRM track at the ICE Conference in London.

Foviance is building a gaming panel of >200 players/punters by January 2011 and will survey them based upon questions our clients and other operators want to know regarding CRM and Loyalty. The research that Foviance conducts will be presented by Mariana Da Silva at the ICE conference and the session is entitled, “CRM and Loyalty in the Gaming Sector: Examining the Current State of Play”.

*Foviance is looking to recruit a panel of online bettors (sports, poker, bingo, casino) who are interested in helping us with our in-house gaming research projects. This could mean you complete an online survey, or visit us to provide feedback on a new product or being a member of a focus group. In fact, it could be any type of research that involves feedback around online gaming.

All participants will be provided incentives for helping us. This could be a cash incentive, gift vouchers or points that can be accumulated and put towards a cash / voucher incentive.

If you are interested in joining our research panel, please complete the survey and we will keep your details on our database.

We are very serious about data protection and guarantee that your information will be protected. You can withdraw from the panel at any time.

Welcome to this latest edition of your Foviance newsletter. In this issue we look at the changing face of mobile customer experience and the rapid developments we’re witnessing in 2010: the year of the mobile.

Firstly, Xavier expands on the boom in mobile retail apps. Sean opens up the debate on future direction of targeted mobile advertising. And Jamie enlightens us about ‘Yam-Yams’ and the fickle world of mobile gaming.

I hope you enjoy this latest newsletter.You might also enjoy reading and commenting on some of our consultants’ thoughts and opinions on our regularly updated blog pages.

I would be very interested to hear from you directly with any feedback.

Paul Blunden, CEO, Foviance

In this issue:

Making the most of retail apps
Going local with mobile advertising
Cross-channel experience for Yam Yams!