Eyes down, it’s time to focus on Bingo

At the Annual Online Bingo Summit and Awards on 8-9 June 2010, Foviance took the stage with a rather unique panel that roused the audience and gave great insight into their customers.

The Summit, now in its fifth year, is the place where operators, game developers and providers come together to learn, debate and discuss all things bingo. It’s a great event with some fantastic speakers, panel debates and networking opportunities.

Foviance’s session, entitled ‘Player Perspective’, was aimed at:

• Finding out what real players make of the various online bingo websites out there
• Discovering what really brings them back time and time again
• Understanding what they search for when opening a new account with an online bingo website

And how did we do it? Well how else? In the usual Foviance way, we involved the customer.

Assembling five regular bingo players (four female and one male), Mariana Da Silva, Foviance’s Head of UX Gaming  led a forty minute focus group.

Focus groups are great for extracting perceptions, opinions, beliefs and attitudes towards a product, service, concept, advertisement or idea. Questions are asked in an interactive group setting in which participants are free to talk with other group members. Each session seeks to bring out rich information that couldn’t otherwise be gained from other forms of research. However, given the small number of participants, it’s important to note that not all findings are necessarily representative of the entire market but instead seek to show true intent.

To say there were some surprising, if not extraordinary, observations from the focus group, would be an understatement. The first surprise was the players themselves, who had been randomly chosen by a third party recruitment company based upon a profile of ‘playing bingo regularly’. Foviance had not met the participants, they had not been informed about what they’d be discussing, and of course Foviance had no idea what kind of responses they would provide.

So it was a surprise to many that none of the bingo players were ladies over forty, none professed to watch Emmerdale or Jeremy Kyle, and all of them came across as extremely well informed and quite savvy. Two of them bucked the anticipated trend of betting by sportsbook, with both preferring the more sophisticated Betfair site which allowed them to be more ‘analytical’ in placing their bets. The participants had an average of between five and six bingo accounts, each with a good spread across many of the more well known brands. Their average spend was approximately £150 per month.

The first theme – exploring expectations, preferences and habits – revealed that bingo offered a chance for both mothers and those in full time employment to switch off, relax and forget about day to day pressures. For many, the ‘automatic’ feature which strikes off the numbers without human intervention is almost permanently switched on – perfect for mums whose jobs are never finished, whatever time of day or night. For the sophisticated sportsbook punters it offers the chance of playing ‘without having to think’.

The second theme was an opportunity to explore specific aspects of bingo sites – promotions, cross sell, banners, chat and more. What works for them, what doesn’t, what they like and so on.

Rather unsurprisingly, all participants were seduced by cash promotion – the key incentive to open an account with any operator. That said, there must be a clear route to redeeming cash promotions. If it is too complex or seemingly unattainable, then they shy away. Once they have opened an account it is important for them to be able to play for free and get used to game play before committing any spend.

None of them paid any attention to the stories of other winners, which didn’t necessarily instil confidence in the site. They “weren’t bothered” if somebody else had won – our participants are there to win for themselves. Although everybody on the panel switched off the chat functionality, the existence of chat was still important as it gave them a sense of community. Above all, the ability to customise the site and allow the player to switch functionality on and off was extremely important.

The attraction of playing bingo on a mobile received a mixed reception. Those that didn’t like the idea thought that they already spent so much time in the house on the computer either playing bingo or on other types of gaming that they didn’t wish to be glued to the mobile doing the same. Those that did like it enjoyed the freedom to play during spare time; on the bus, the train and so on.

The final theme gave the participants a chance to view the homepage of all the award nominees and express their opinions on look and feel and how likely they would be to sign up and play. Interestingly none of the participants were that keen on the glitzy sites clearly targeted at females. This extended to the “somewhat cheesy” TV adverts which proved annoying (though later they admitted to opening accounts with such operators).

Big winners were clean, simple, uncluttered sites which were sympathetic to the eye and easy to use as a newcomer. ‘Tea and Bingo’ was a firm favourite. Another relative newcomer, ‘Caesar Bingo’ had the thumbs up for its classy look and feel. On the flipside, the childish cartoony sites lost credibility and were a strong no-no across the group. The bigger brands did well largely due to the fact they were well known and trusted rather than what was happening on the site.

The session enlightened many of the top level audience members as it enabled them to listen to their customers first hand. Very often at Foviance we see that many gaming companies tend to make important decisions by intuition and assumption without real insight from the customer. This is beginning to change with some adopting the mantra, “data trumps intuition”. Real insight, whether it be analytics on the site or qualitative research relating to a site or game play, is one of the most important stages in the development cycle.

The focus group, one of a number of research methods adopted by Foviance, ably demonstrated how involving customers throughout the development stages of a Bingo site can deliver real competitive advantage simply through better understanding and by more closely matching expectations.

This article was written as part of our June newsletter