At a time when customer loyalty is increasingly hard won, world-class customer service can mean the difference between a lifelong customer and a damaged reputation, says BetConstruct’s Mary Grigoryan.
In today’s fiercely competitive online casino sector, players are increasingly demanding a VIP service when it comes to resolving their questions, problems and complaints.
For many customers, the service they receive has a huge impact on spending decisions: if you offer a quick, friendly and efficient service, that customer is far more likely to bet with you again; if you fail on any of those fronts, you could lose a player for life.
In recent years, operators in the iGaming space have come to realise that they must either step up or get left behind, but for those who decide to improve their customer service, the scale of the task ahead can be daunting.
To develop a customer service team that meets today’s high standards involves creating huge amounts of new office space, finding passionate staff, developing state-of-the-art communication channels, meeting the latest data protection regulations, monitoring KPIs and offering the best quality ongoing training for staff to handle sensitive issues such as problem gambling – often in several languages.
For operators who are overwhelmed by this challenge, award-winning gaming supplier BetConstruct is keen to tackle the hard work for them.
According to Mary Grigoryan, who heads up BetConstruct’s customer services branch, their best-in-class CRM system aims to create a “vital bridge” between businesses and players that reflects the company’s core values.
“One of the most important departments for any iGaming business is their customer support team,” she explained. “Any good CS team should adopt these basic principles: easy to reach, warm and friendly, well trained on all products and licences, knowledgeable and responsible.”
With more than 11 years’ experience in the betting and gaming sector, Grigoran understands that working in customer service can be high-stakes operation. If a customer service system fails on any of her ‘basic principles’ – whether that’s ease of access, friendliness, knowledge, responsibility or training – the consequences for a business can be disastrous.
“Competition in the iGaming sector is fierce and poor service can directly lead to an operator losing their players’ trust and loyalty,” she said. “It’s a sad fact that players are far more likely to talk about a bad experience than a good one – creating negative reviews on the countless customer forums, influencing future player acquisition and damaging the overall reputation of the business.”
Players’ increasingly high expectations of online firms – and the plethora of places they can air their views when they feel dissatisfied – have meant that the doctrine of “the customer is always right” is now truer than ever. When a player needs a problem resolved, it’s vital that the resolution is as quick as possible – and that players are able to use the medium of their choice to get through to the operator.
This demand for convenience was at the forefront of BetConstruct’s mind when developing their CS systems. Their cutting edge software integrates with a huge number of communication channels, offering nearly 200 features that allow players to reach someone quickly via the channel of their choice. This includes call centres, email, instant chat, Facebook, Slack, Twitter, contact forms and video calls, to name just a few.
Equally, to ensure that customers are responding well to the service, they use the best data analytics in conjunction with top notch data protection.
“The unified reporting dashboard provides an operator with the opportunity to see a complete overview of what players are saying combined with answer times, agent ratings and agent availability,” said Grigoryan. “On a more technical level, we also use industry best practice performance measures to track our answer times, resolution rates and levels of customer satisfaction, as well as measuring employee engagement.
“Data protection is a major topic at the moment, so it goes without saying that all player data is protected by top level data privacy and security which is GDPR compliant, HTTPS encrypted, and successfully passed the Google OAuth API verification audit.”
According to Grigoryan, BetConstruct’s CS team refuses to separate players into first and second-class customers who in turn receive first and second class rates of service. In their view, every player should be treated like a VIP, although operators who do want to create more tailored systems will have the option to do so.
“Our back-office system does allow team-members to quickly identify the categorisation of a player, and we can offer packages for extra tailored support for partner’s customers that are more valuable, including regular health checks, satisfaction and feedback surveys, retention and acquisition campaigns,” she said.
So far, this philosophy has proven successful: customers have responded well to their speedy, flexible and knowledgeable service, while BetConstruct’s partners have been pleased with the results of their upgraded customer service systems.
“Our most important measure of success comes from the feedback of our partners – if an operator is satisfied that’s a token of success for our team too,” explained Grigoryan. “We pride ourselves on providing a service based on trust, transparency, and flexibility along with a consistent service quality, which together with great value allows us to establish strong, lasting relationships with our partners.”
