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

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

• 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.

• 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

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.

I then move on to the next gaming site that is Unibet. There are a couple of things that make this process an interesting and most importantly, a pleasant one. Firstly, for a gaming site their field entry in-situ automatic contextual help function pleasantly indicates the requirements for each field entry. Hence, giving you a heads-up on what is required so you avoid making mistakes. For example, upon hitting the mobile number entry field, the following message was displayed to the right of the field: “Please enter your phone number by entering a ‘+’ sign and the country code first. Follow the country code with the telephone number, leaving out the ’0′ of the first number”.

Secondly, the design of the form itself is clean and clear, and contains clear calls-to-action for live help and contact details.

As you are reading this you are probably thinking “So what? So many sites design their forms with in-situ contextual help and so many forms have simple and clean designs”. Yes, you would be right to think so. However, the purpose of this blog post is to comment on what happened next.

I decided I wanted to opt out of receiving communications on news and events from Unibet, simply because I receive so many emails from betting companies that most do get ignored. I hit the register button and was shown the following screen:

I literally laughed out loud upon reading this message. Not because I found it bizarre or patronising, but because it felt honest and I had never seen messaging of this kind before on any site (let alone gaming). Thus, I felt I had no choice but to oblige and think “Why not?”

So, in essence, I felt that Unibet’s quirky yet simple and almost humane approach to get me to change my mind and opt-in to receive news and events information from them, coupled with the prior pleasant and straightforward experience of filling out the registration form had a truly positive effect and made me to give in to them.

It would be interesting to see how this type of persuasive messaging would work for other businesses (retail and other). They may find it worth their while to consider it… after all, if you don’t try, you’ll never know what you are missing!

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

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.

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!

So when I think about my world of marketing, brand and user experience, I often look at him and consider that he is somewhat absolved from the matter, almost that he is not capable of being understood as an individual or won over as a customer on the grounds of such squandering.

All this changed in the past week when I saw him placing his bets on his new iPhone. I have spent many years listening to him pass through the layers of telephone security necessary before he can place his next winner at Windsor, Ascot or Wolverhampton. So to see him with an iPhone was somewhat of a surprise – almost as if someone from the back-roads of Dudley shouldn’t be seen using such shiny new technology!

So far I have used plain English speaking, guessing that not all of you will understand ‘Yam Yam’, the language of the Black Country. But knowing there are only few bookmakers who have launched an iPhone application I asked him who he was betting with, and he told me. “Why is that?” I asked. I asked the question because I knew that for many years he’d used a different bookmaker who he’d always raved about and to whom he is very well known through its call centre. Both bookmakers already offer good iPhone applications.

I found his response somewhat interesting and thought that it really demonstrated how, if an organisation considers user experience as truly cross-channel, it can really begin to gain competitive advantage and win customers.

He said: “I’ve recently started a new job which keeps me out of the office or on the road half of the time. This means that after doing my homework on any given day’s races, I am ready to place my bets from around midday, where I’ll either be sitting in front of my PC or on the mobile in the car.” “OK”, I said, “but why are you not using your usual bookmaker that also has a good iPhone app?” Because, he said “ just recently I’ve started playing poker too, and this new bookmaker is the only company that will allow me to switch funds between sports and poker easily on the mobile. I can bet in the day on the horses on the PC or on the iPhone, use my winnings on poker at home in the evening and in the morning I will have the same funds accessible on my iPhone to bet on sports again. What’s more, if I win on either I can walk into the bookies and collect the cash over the counter and have it in my hand. I can’t do that with my old bookmaker.”

That last line really struck a chord, “a penny dropping” moment as I heard it described this week. Invariably the projects in which Foviance has traditionally been involved in tend to be in silos, and I believe this is commonplace amongst the majority of our gaming clients where the different businesses think and operate as such. What we are finding more and more however with people like Luke and other customers, is that they become loyal to a particular operator not just because they have the best sports book or the best casino, but because the experience of using the different betting methods and administrating their funds is seamless, particularly across multiple channels.

Being able to move money between different betting accounts, having single sign-in security, talking on the telephone about an individual’s account rather than just sports book or just casino, collecting money from the High Street – these are all important to any player or punter. Brands getting this right can make the difference between having loyal customers with healthy cross fertilisation across games, or a few customers using a single game now and again.

This article was writtern as part of the Foviance July/August Newsletter

There are, of course, situations when we may want to order in one click, in particular if the order is simple (1 or 2 items) and/or the basket contents are always visible. This is particularly true when we already trust the brand and have an account with them (e.g. Amazon, who provide one-click purchases as an option).

The other example is betting. In a world where urgency matters, for example in the case of in-play betting, wasting valuable time to check your bet is the last thing you need. In addition, most online sportsbooks have permanent bet slips, which are in fact permanently open ‘baskets’, with their contents permanently exposed.

Recently, I went to place a bet on a site that is not my main account (where checking my bets is not part of my betting process). I wanted to bet on a horse in a race that was about to start and only had a couple of minutes to do it. However, as I am used to betting without checking I didn’t complete the process and didn’t realise it. Two steps – adding bet to slip and clicking on main call-to-action – were all that I was used to doing every time I placed a bet. I never placed my bet (it was stuck in the confirmation stage) and I lost a winner. This doesn’t mean that online sportsbooks should remove all checking options from their sites. There are, after all, very complex bets – accumulators and mixed bets – that may need confirmation by some more cautious punters, even if they can be seen on the bet slip. However, checking your bets should not be default, it should be given as an option, ideally as an account setting with added options were punters can choose to check all multiple bets or all bets above a certain total amount, for example, but not check single and small bets.

Confirmation and checking steps in the wider e-commerce world should be considered in light of order complexity, basket visibility and whether the context is particularly security-sensitive. But when it comes to betting, urgency matters and defaulting all bets to be confirmed every time provides an experience that is the antithesis of what betting should ‘feel’ like.