Mansion's casino.com re-brand focuses on greater user experience

Mansion recently revealed its freshly re-branded flagship site Casino.com. The re-design will be backed by a “significant investment” in the brand’s marketing, in an effort to grow Mansion’s UK presence.

The fresh faced Casino.com offers enhanced performance, better speed and an overall “greater user experience” Mansion’s director of development Rami Avital says. Possibly the most prominent push operators are making in product development is implementing personalisation, offering players a completely customised experience based on their habits and what they want. For Casino.com customers, their entire player journey is customised, from their push notifications, to the banners they see on the website and the games they wish to play. Rami offers EGR Technology a deeper insight into the tech behind the website’s re-brand.

EGR Technology: In terms of technology, what were the biggest changes made to the Casino.com website as part of the re-launch?

Rami Avital (RA): With regards to our desktop version we moved everything onto our new CMS system, the change also included the migration of all the website content, that’s tens of thousands of pages, to the new system. Of course also new look and design. We implemented new a caching system that provides us with amazing performance and fast speed. On the mobile side we upgraded to the latest version of the WPL3 portal platform from Playtech, adding our customisation and optimisation on top of that. That enables greater user experience, but we improved it even more.

EGR Technology: How do you stay ahead of competitors?

RA: First of all we keep our technology updated constantly. We want to be at the frontline of the industry in general. Our development and product and business areas all work really closely and that brings us a lot of business value. We can react fast to changes in the industry and market and provide fast business value. We implement advanced optimisation tools to improve our product UX based on new directions and results. In general we encourage creativity and innovation within the company in general. We do things like annual hackathons during which the teams come with their own ideas. We have implemented at least three of them this year and included them in our product. Our unique edge is that we’re not just copying what others do.

EGR Technology: How does the new site allow for better personalisation?

RA: First of all I’ll mention that the best service we can give is by knowing our players. So we invest a lot in advanced segmentation and data analysis on what our players like, what they prefer and what they actually do, in terms of both historical and real-time data. All those segments are being fed and synced into our portals and clients. Like that we serve personalised content. Marketing, banners, the games, each player gets their own set of whatever they need. We also optimise with testing and then personalise it forward. The new site supports this technology. It is real-time personalisation and optimisation.

EGR Technology: What were some of the biggest hurdles you faced in the re-development?

RA: In general it wasn’t just a re-vamp, it was much bigger than that. It was a rebrand of our major brand casino.com. It was a cross company effort, not just on the tech side. We had to synchronise a lot of changes on both mobile, desktop and native application, in marketing campaigns and affiliates. Everything had to change with the new design. The biggest challenge was synchronising all that to go live on the same day.

RA: Basically 100% of it is in-house, we have a development centre in Bulgaria where we develop mostly everything, including the CMS system. We also have a dedicated development in Kiev, which we consider in-house also.

EGR Technology: Why Bulgaria?

RA: We’ve worked with Bulgaria for around five years now. Initially we had an outsource company based here. It was growing and we were happy with the quality so around two years ago we decided to expand our in-house development further. We moved the development centre from Israel to Bulgaria. I relocated and we established our own research technology centre here that allowed us to expand and grow. That was two and a half year ago.

EGR Technology: How did you manage to score the Casino.com domain?

RA: I guess it was a matter of luck and good investment!

EGR Technology: Finally, are there any other major tech movements in process at the moment?

RA: Currently we are upgrading our platforms for better performance and ability. We invest a lot in mobile products, like new native apps and desktop. We keen taking our work to the next level. We invest a lot in automation testing and monitoring to ensure all of our products are in maximum up-time and getting the best quality that they can.