Ladbrokes Coral talks omni-channel 2.0

As mobile betting and gaming exploded around 2015, the buzzword on everybody’s lips was omni-channel. It was a way to keep vast retail estates relevant during the mobile revolution, while also increasing player LTVs and lowering CPAs. However the concept was the subject of so many roundtables and conference speeches that it became passé and the industry moved onto new buzzwords, from personalisation to blockchain.

However even if the initial buzz has dissipated, the firms with vast retail estates continue to beaver away in an effort to tap into these aforementioned benefits. In the last couple of months alone, Betfair has launched a new scheme to let customers deposit via Paddy Power shops; BoyleSports has rolled out an app that lets customers track retail bets, and William Hill announced plans to kick-start a major omni-channel push.

But of course these firms are all playing catch-up, with one operator, Ladbrokes Coral, being almost unanimously perceived as the market leader. Even Hills CEO Philip Bowcock said as such when talking about his firm’s upcoming omni-channel push, admitting that “others are ahead of us”.

And while the Ladbrokes Coral omni-channel push slowed down during the merger integration, the firm is intent on leveraging the learnings and experiences of both companies to make itself the clear market leader once again.

Below, Ladbrokes Coral omni-channel director Nicklas Zajdel tells EGR Intel what he learned from other industries and outlines his plans for omni-channel 2.0.

EGR Intel: Where were the two brands respectively on omni-channel ahead of the merger, as Jim Mullen has previously admitted Coral was slightly ahead?

Nicklas Zajdel (NZ): From the outside we didn’t know Coral was ahead. The merger has enabled us to review best practices across our two brands and take the best of two market leading solutions as both companies had taken a different approach to the same puzzle. Coral Connect was all about creating an omni-wallet. Players using the Connect Card had the same funds wherever they went, whereas the Grid was much more of a companion app with features like bet tracking, cash out and statistics.

Effectively the two brands approached the omni-channel concept from different angles. Coral Connect was mainly technology driven while Ladbrokes applied customer-centric features to create a connected and convenient user experience.

Nicklas Zajdel, omni-channel director at Ladbrokes Coral

Following the merger we are looking to apply the best of both worlds to our products going forward, and crucially we benefited from understanding two different sets of issues and having two different sets of data to help us understand customers.

EGR Intel: Can you quantify the positive impact of an omni-channel approach on your customers? It’s been reported in the past that Coral Connect customers made up more than half of Coral.co.uk revenues.

NZ: There is a premium to the omni-channel customer LTVs. That’s based on higher engagement, more frequent activity and more loyalty. So we know there’s a benefit to getting customers to transact in more than one channel. We also recognise the effectiveness of acquiring these customers through great self-service journeys and great colleague interactions in shops. The cost of acquisition there is very attractive for the business. Without going into too much detail it’s driven by brand loyalty and engagement.

EGR Intel: As more and more transactions are completed online, is omni-channel still as important?

NZ: More and more customers start off betting online and the migration to mobile is particularly evident. But I don’t see that it hurts omni-channel. Our goal is to offer a consistent and convenient offering to customers wherever they transact with us, regardless of channel. A customer doesn’t recognise channels. So if we take a customer-centric approach we want to let them transact in the same way across all channels.

We also see a very strong demand in online customers using retail shops as a way to get cash. One of the key reasons people use retail is location and convenience. If you have a young chap betting on the weekend and his acca wins on the Saturday, that takes at least 48 hours for that money to hit his bank account. Through our online cashier you can get that out from a shop in cash immediately. That’s an extremely powerful benefit we offer customers and we don’t see that demand dropping at all.

I’m also focusing on making the retail experience more relevant to the demographic that’s native to mobile, by expanding the digital propositions in our shop including WiFi, and more SSBTs. Being able to fund your online wallet through an SSBT, for instance, is very valuable for customers, even if the majority of your activity is online.

EGR Intel: A lot of rivals talk about closing the gap in omni-channel on LCL – is anyone getting close?

NZ: Ladbrokes Coral is ahead of the pack and the fact that competitors in the betting industry are starting to adopt omni-channel strategies just spurs us on to innovate further and continue our investment in the space. It’s important to recognise that while the UK betting industry is moving forward in the omni space, there are other high street retailers also developing cross-channel propositions. We spend quite some time reviewing developments in other industries to see where we can learn and improve our own strategy; to date my own experience is that Ladbrokes Coral has been pioneering omni-channel transformation even in comparison to different retail industries.

EGR Intel: What makes LCL such a pioneer?

NZ: Ladbrokes Coral now has two and three years respectively gained experience of omni-channel operations and propositions. We have accumulated regional understanding of player behaviour and value, transformed operations to deliver empowering colleague programmes coupled with rewarding customer experiences. The merged company is currently starting our journey of delivering omni-channel 2.0, which will be an even more refined strategy extending the omni-channel key principles across modernised Epos, shop WiFi, colleague tools and processes and customer facing products and features.

Zajdel says the merged company is starting its journey of delivering omni-channel 2.0

One thing we can do with this strategy is offer much more localised promotions. For instance we have been signing deals with football teams to establish betting kiosks in-stadia, and we can offer targeted promotions. You’ve seen these enhanced prices of 25/1 for a specific team to win to entice new customers. You can tailor that with our local presence. So enhancing Sunderland to win is going to be much more popular in Sunderland.

EGR Intel: What have you learned from other industries?

NZ: There’s a lot of technology-driven innovation rather than customer-centric innovation. What springs to mind is Tesco allowing customers to manage their fridge through voice commands and AI. That allows you to order your groceries by speaking to a hardware device and set up some machine learning where you will get your weekly groceries without having to articulate it. I’ve seen this trialled in our own industry with voice commands and virtual reality devices. But I’m sceptical about these propositions at present.

We do a lot of experimenting internally but I believe we need to do things that immediately benefit our customers and we don’t want to enforce changes in behaviour that are difficult to adopt.

We want to make our customers’ and staffs’ lives easier and facilitate cross-channel journeys. There’s a demand for that. We have 20-year customers who want to read their Racing Post in the shop and bet over the counter but they have a smartphone and may want to check their bet on the move, and that’s an opportunity for us.

EGR Intel: So what are your plans for innovation going forward?

NZ: So, we have been extremely busy this year and considering we have been on a merger and integration journey I am extremely pleased by our progress, which has been about giving the best of each brand to the other. We have extended our Grid retail bet tracker and cash out functionality to include SSBT bets, making us the only brand offering tracking of both retail over the counter and SSBT bets.

We have also introduced fixtures, stats and results information to our retail apps to help our customers build their bets, overlaid with personalisation capabilities.

We launched a Coral Connect retail companion app ahead of the English Premier League start, replicating the bet tracking and cash out functionality of the Ladbrokes Grid App. We are implementing the second phase of an omni wallet in Ladbrokes by the end of this year, realising the transactional utility our Coral Connect customers have enjoyed.

The short-term plans are to capitalise on best practices across the brands and move even further forward with better technology and customer facing applications. Furthermore we are now progressing our omni-channel 2.0 strategy, extending our omni-channel principles even further into the retail environment and digital operations. We have every intention to continue to lead in this space and I can promise you will see further innovative first-to-market omni-channel features later this year and into 2018.