Q&A: 888 on engaging customers with responsible gambling innovation

Responsible gambling solutions can often be formulaic and blanket in their approach, rather than addressing the individual nuances of each player.

To address this issue, 888 has developed a new Control Centre interface, which serves as a prompt to players where needed and a check to at-risk individuals, encompassing a more holistic approach.

Below, 888 head of safer gambling Andrew Anthony discusses the development of the new software with EGR.

EGR: Congratulations on the new Control Centre interface, what’s the methodology behind it?

Andrew Anthony (AA): Thanks, it’s something we’ve been working on for a long period of time. As any operator can illustrate, the normal model for responsible gambling has always been analysing customer behaviour, and then having the right level of interaction with the customer to get them to reflect on their gambling. The problem with that model is that sometimes there’s a big disconnect between customer activity and the time when that interaction commences. With this in mind, we wanted to provide them with the tools to reflect on their gambling themselves while they’re in the gambling environment, providing them with quick and easy access to an interface that shows player deposit patterns, spend and how long they’ve been playing. This is what sparked the idea of the Control Centre and we’re very excited about it. A lot of people have worked on this in Romania, Israel and Gibraltar and I know it’s early days but we’re all very proud of it.

EGR: How long has it been under development?

AA: It’s been in development at some stage over the past nine months. Prior to that, there was a lot of discussion on ideas and brainstorming the best ways that customers could interact with it. We really wanted to make it attractive to customers so they feel that it was part of the existing 888 product and not some distant application they had to root around to find. That was one of the big objectives of the project.

EGR: What functionality will be included in the first launch phase?

AA: We have initially included all the responsible gambling tools that we have today. However, we’ve also included feedback graphs and data based on player gambling activity. For example, the deposit history and withdrawal history allow players to filter between a week, 30 days, 90 days or whichever period they want, and it displays the number of days they’ve been active on the site over the same period. Players can monitor their activity to get a feeling for how long they’ve spent on gambling, not just in money terms, but also in time. We also include tips, like: how do I know if I’ve been playing too much? Or, do I need help? We include a list of sites or where they can get help if required, and of course, access to ourselves via our customer support team if they need assistance.

EGR: Has this been developed in-house or have you engaged with external companies?

AA: No, this has been developed 100% in-house, mostly by our responsible gambling team working in conjunction with the guys in our product teams. This has also had tremendous support from the top 888 management team. The team worked very hard to get this all ready to launch during Safer Gambling Week as we wanted to capitalise on the nationwide campaign to raise awareness of the Control Centre.

EGR: Does it use visual prompts or messaging to encourage reflection among gamblers?

AA: It will but this is for a later phase of the project. We’ve launched the product successfully but our work doesn’t stop there as there’s still a lot more to do. We’ve got to measure customer behaviour, how they’re interacting with the Control Centre and of course whether the Control Centre is making an impact on customer behaviour. It’s given us another great avenue to get insights on customer behaviour, helping to understand what works. Now the challenge is to analyse that data and transition this into upgrades and changes to our products where applicable.

EGR: The rollout of the product is going to be phased, how will this work?

AA: We’re rolling out to a small number of customers in our UK environment this month. This will allow us to monitor how customers work with the interface and to test the product in a live environment. After that, we plan to slowly roll it out in weeks and months to come, not just for our UK market but all our international markets worldwide. This is not just a one or two phase project, this is a continuous programme that we want to commit to every single year, with new tools and new alerts to create that connection with our customers.

EGR: Is there any potential to provide the Control Centre software on a B2B basis?

AA: In our other efforts towards safer gambling, we share information with peers across the industry, but B2B isn’t in the first phase of our development. Our solution was built for our platform and we’re keen to keep it that way. It is not something we’ve considered but maybe for the future. Our focus right now is on really understanding how customers interact with the solution. We also want input from other groups on the best ways to interact with our customers. We’ve dealt with people who work with research in this realm. We presented the Control Centre to them and they helped us with the language and with some of the features.