Personalisation, and even hyper personalisation, has been widely documented and touches upon many aspects of the igaming world, as well as being widely suggested as being paramount to customer retention.

With the embedding of personalisation into an operator’s core operations increasingly identified as a key barrier in generating additional gaming yield, Damien Evans, co-founder of Graphyte, elaborates on empowering lobby managers through technology – the overarching narrative of which is one of inclusiveness.

Empowering the lobby manager with personalisation

Casino lobby personalisation has been hovering somewhere between nascent and non existent for the past couple of years, in spite of genuine strides forward in the tech space with bespoke products built to serve the niche.

The value of a highly-tuned and personalised lobby cannot be overstated. We all know that the lobby is the hub of any digital casino, seen by every user and responsible for the vast majority of game launches.

On the surface of it, the concept is simple – make it easy for players to find the games they love to play, whilst simultaneously surfacing the new games that keep players interested and drive so much. How hard can it be?

Perceived barriers

The reality is more complex. Firstly (and wrongly), the core concepts, delivery and therefore understanding of the benefits of personalisation rarely sit within the operations teams that ultimately govern and manage which games go on the site, and where they sit on the lobby and category pages.

The tooling that drives personalisation is, in almost every case, not designed with gaming
operations in mind, with many of the standard solutions built for e-commerce merchandisers in mind (at best), and quite often requiring developer-level knowledge of front-end site manipulation to bring in any real changes.

This lack of agility and usability can create an insurmountable barrier for fast-moving operations teams, all of whom are in a constant cycle of new releases and ongoing inventory management often at a frenetic pace and anything that adds to workload is never likely to be adopted.

Commercial constraints

Beyond the tooling and agility barriers are the often highly complex commercial arrangements around exclusivity and supplier coverage on the lobby, which create a constant headache for lobby managers across the entire gaming industry. Finding a way to integrate a personalised element alongside the commercial constraints can feel like a labyrinthian task at the best of times.

Our insight

We’ve been working with multiple gaming operators over the last couple of years, in constant dialogue with customer experience and marketing teams, and ever more closely with operations teams.

Hearing these challenges consistently across our customer base led us to understand that a) there has to be a better way to manage both an optimised customer experience that fits with the huge challenge of running a gaming site, and b) embedding personalisation into core operations is the sure-fire way of generating additional yield from the core customer base without needing to ramp up marketing spend.

Last year, Graphyte launched a product called Intelligent Layouts to do exactly that. The casino product is aimed squarely at solving all these issues in one package. Designed specifically for lobby managers and customer experience teams, allowing full control over content categories, exclusive and promoted content whilst at the same time driving deep personalisation. All delivered through a simple integration to the existing CMS.

In-built de-duplication technology solves the very real problem of showing the same titles
multiple times on the same page, and the inclusion of a mixture of regularly played and new titles across the lobby creates a genuinely unique experience for every player, whether they prefer live casino, slots or instant win (or any combination of games).

Payoff

We have seen in our client base, without exception, that deep personalisation of the lobby is the single biggest driver of core staking to the existing user base, with top-line staking increases of more than 5 per cent.