Stars tops etruvian Consulting inaugural customer service benchmark

PokerStrategy’s independent consulting arm, etruvian Consulting, has ranked PokerStars at the top of its inaugural customer service benchmark, with a number of skins operating centralised services and land-based operators lagging behind, eGaming Review can reveal.

Following several months of rigorous development and testing, it benchmarked 20 brands comprising of a mix of standalone sites such as PokerStars; large operators such as bwin.party; and five smaller operators on the industry’s five largest poker networks; etruvian Consulting scored each site on a four-tiered, weighted scale that it hopes will support operators to improve their quality of service.

PartyPoker and PKR were ranked second and third respectively while larger multi-vertical operators fell further back with the likes of William Hill (seventh), Ladbrokes (ninth) and 888 (16th) all falling down on areas such as product knowledge and personalisation.

Using a “mystery shopper” approach sites were contacted in English only by an alleged new user using email and/or live chat. Each one was scored across a number of metrics including email response times, product knowledge, personalisation, friendliness, escalations, accessibility and extra mile.

Each assessed room had multiple new consumers sign up to their service and were asked questions of varying complexity and difficulty, designed to identify trends in consumer experience and resolution technique.

etruvian consultant and author of the report David Coleman, said: “In our survey, we have found that there is room for improvement in the area of customer service, which can add significant value to those companies who take that opportunity. There were some recurring issues that if addressed, would improve their results overall,” he added.

PokerStars topped the 20 site shortlist beating the competition by a relatively narrow margin. “They were quick, accurate, their product knowledge was exceptional as you would expect it to be” he added.

Coleman also said that smaller, often niche skins were effective at customer service, taking the time to deal with individual queries in a highly engaging and personal manner.

“A common issue we saw during the benchmarking process was that many operators failed to address all the points of a query or that the formatting was of a low enough standard that it impacted readability. We also saw instances of communication where the name in the greeting was left blank, leaving only a “Dear ,” or spelling mistakes on every other line of text. We were even ignored outright on more than one occasion,” the report found.

“Customer support teams publicly represent industry brands and are the front line of defence against lost customers and negative publicity, driving deposits and stretching life time values ““ they are the only direct contact the majority of our customers will ever have with us,” it added.

All of the different operations have different opportunities to optimise aspects of their customer support quality; however the tests proved that strong performance is possible in all categories together.

etruvian Consulting is offering to actively help operators improve their customer service, based on their findings from the benchmark and through performing custom assessments for alternative verticals, intra-network benchmarking as well as performing the benchmarking in alternative languages. Contact details have been provided below.

You can download the debut benchmark from here.

David Coleman
etruvian Consulting
David.Coleman@etruvianConsulting.com
00350 54594000