Sportsbooks, AI and personalisation – an opportunity missed?

AI is currently getting a lot of attention because we have all watched it used in movies, and the role it can play in the real-time space is exciting. Being able to bring worlds together and merge in-play, chat and social is a compelling proposition for the igaming market. However, when I talk to gaming companies, the one thing they emphasise most frequently is that personalisation must be improved. This may seem strange for such an innovative industry. One would assume that the increasing use of AI to track customer activities and preferences would be driving hyper-personalisation of the gaming customer experience. Not necessarily.

If you look at Netflix, for example, they do the personalisation piece really well. These streaming companies have been doing it for years: they track what you’re doing and present comparable product recommendations back to you. They are the epitome of AI success. They help people find things they didn’t even know they wanted. From my perspective, igaming companies need to do the same thing by examining the readily available tools and platforms that can easily and effectively help them deliver a hyper-personalised and engaging customer experience with their sportsbook applications.

There are various types of personalisation that igaming companies can do:

• Individual customer personalisation – this is about improving customer satisfaction through focused activity tracking to provide each customer with information on the sports they are interested in, associated sports and events that might also interest them, information on their wallet and what bets they have made, and special offers tailored to their betting preferences, etc.
• Group personalisation – group personalisation can be by sports type, customer demographic, customer betting style, or any group attribute of choice to deliver targeted promotions.
• Geographic personalisation – the ability to personalise and target customers by location is important because, for example, in the States there are different federal and state rules, so data needs to be tailored to satisfy regulatory requirements.
• Device personalisation –personalisation by device type opens new promotional opportunities geared to the habits of the device users, for example bettors who like to bet and track events on their mobile phones.

Critically, sportsbooks must be able to anticipate customer desire based on their actions and respond. Responding to customers in a hyper-personalised manner can move the goal posts away from churn and towards customer retention and increased engagement. Personalisation is about improving conversion and increasing revenue. However, for many sportsbooks the user experience and look of their products is still a work in progress.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for Personalisation Engines describes personalisation as ‘flexible user segmentation across known and inferred values to support rule-based personalisation, including contextual data and user feedback.’ Put simply, this is really about how we engage with customers and define rules, both at the data level and the personal level.

And it isn’t as challenging as it may sound. With today’s technology, gaming companies can easily track and analyse user actions and behaviour. Better yet, they don’t have to build a lot of bespoke code to manage different topics or different groupings of personalisation data because there are low-code data platforms available to offload both the development burden upfront as well as the ongoing operational burden from back-end systems. These technologies can integrate, transform and manage the customer data from AI or machine learning systems, and integrate it with all of the other customer data.

These data platforms can take input from AI systems that tell us what we should be presenting to the customers, and also integrate with data on what the customer is subscribed to and not subscribed to.

When a customer engages with a sportsbook, it is critical that they can easily, for example, choose a particular football league, or view the markets per-match or in-play opportunities, see odds, review real-time scores or check their wallet or bets. They want easy access to the full picture. To achieve this, data must be delivered to tens or hundreds of thousands of customers simultaneously in real time. Understanding data and leveraging it to deliver highly personalised content is a major opportunity for revenue growth within the sportsbook space.

The usage of real-time data requires direct connectivity to a variety of data sources. In the past, this meant engaging in a long, expensive data integration project development. Today, companies can use an Intelligent Event-Data platform to save development time. Further, the core expertise of the majority of igaming companies lies in the development of gaming applications, not in optimising streaming data technology. Gaming developers and software architects often struggle with the complexities of creating event-driven, real-time web, mobile and IoT applications because they are not data-wrangling experts. This is where an Intelligent Event-Data Platform can help. Such platforms are purpose-built to oversee the unique, real-time data ingestion, processing and delivery challenges among data sources, applications, users and devices for igaming companies.

It goes without saying that hyper-personalisation can be a big win for the igaming industry. Consider that igaming companies can now look at what customers are interested in and tailor offerings, all in real time – enabling AI to make relevant recommendations. Undoubtedly, data wrangling plays a big part in the personalisation piece. Being able to gather information from a multitude of data points enables sportsbooks to quantify user behaviours and preferences which are vital to the user experience. A system which uses multiple data points can provide a real-time perspective on customers. Real-time data gives instantaneous insights into a customer behaviour, allowing sportsbooks to deliver appropriate content at the right time, every time.

Today, few gaming companies do hyper-personalisation well. I was speaking to a friend at one of the big sportsbook companies recently and he mentioned that, “nobody has quite got personalisation right”. There is undoubtedly a big opportunity out there, and those that innovate fast and use the right technology and platforms will be able to seize it.

Sean Bowen drives the spirit of innovation at Push Technology with his market vision, business acumen, technical expertise and unbounded energy. With his keen understanding of the requirements for real-time data streaming technology to power mission-critical business applications, he founded and has invested his talent in leading Push Technology to serve the real-time data delivery needs of markets worldwide.