The ‘Play Gaming’ experience is one of the seven key Customer Experiences Kindred is focusing on to embrace a customer outside-in approach to how the business operates, organises, designs and delivers change.
As its name suggests, the ‘Play Gaming’ experience, includes journeys that directly relate to players effectively playing on our games. These include playing casino, live casino, bingo, and poker products. Each of those journeys is further broken down into journey steps or micro-journeys.
The vision for the ‘Play Gaming’ experience is one that is fast and stable, tailored to individual needs, and recognised as trustworthy by players. Our competitors offer many of the same games we do, so to stand out we must wrap these games around the best possible gaming experience. It must be easy for customers to find the games/tournaments they are interested in, with rapid loading times, and seamless access to any features they need in-play, all while demonstrating that everyone has a fair chance of winning.
Speed as a core CX principle of the ‘Play Gaming’ Experience
Our aim is to deliver a fast gaming experience. From a customer wants standpoint, we approach speed holistically. Customers need to feel that our sites/apps are fast; they want to be able to access all of the features they need without having to leave the game and find the games/tables they are interested in quickly. They also want a seamless gaming experience when they switch device. Delivering a fast gaming experience might also mean shorter and quicker tournaments.
Therefore, a lot of our recent and future initiatives aim at speeding up the ‘Play Gaming’ experience across several touchpoints.
One concrete example of this focus on speed was the release, last year, of a new in-game top bar on the mobile web. This feature has made a real difference to players as it allows them to stay actively engaged in the game whilst still being able to access important features such as the deposit or tournaments.
Being transparent and engendering Trust
Trust is another important CX principle which the vision behind ‘Play Gaming’ experience builds upon. Similar to Speed, Trust is a multi-dimensional concept.
For our customers, a trustworthy ‘Play Gaming’ experience is about being guaranteed a fair chance of winning, knowing the chances of winning in a certain game, or knowing what to do to withdraw bonus winnings. But it might also mean getting transparency around one’s gaming statistics, seeing when, on what, and how much other customers are winning, or knowing what they need to do to participate in and win a tournament.
Understanding those customer wants and needs is the foundation for setting up clear objectives for the experience, that aim to create further trust.
Clearly showing to our casino players the percentage return-to-player figure (% RTP) and the volatility of our games (i.e: the amount of risk inherent to a specific game) is a concrete way to be more transparent. Ensuring customers are presented with transparent and accurate information relating to any gaming reward wagering requirements can also come a long way toward building trust.
Amongst other initiatives we’ve been undertaking, we are increasing the localness of winners’ lists and are aiming to promote these in an engaging way.
Improving the clarity of our tournament rules and what customers must do to win is also a recurrent focus area.
Our customers’ trust is vital to retaining them across all our brands and in all markets. This definitely applies to the ‘Play Gaming’ experience. They need to know that their funds and data are safe with us, that our products are reliable and that we live up to or even exceed regulatory standards.
Offering a customised gaming experience to players based on their play history
The final CX principle that the ‘Play Gaming’ experience uses as a north star is Relevancy.
As for the Speed and Trust CX principles, delivering a relevant gaming experience can mean different things. Our customers expect to be shown the games they’re interested in. This sounds easy, but with 1000+ available casino games, discovering and selecting the games that best suit your needs can quickly become an overwhelming affair.
Since we’re constantly launching new games, our customers expect to avoid missing out on any new games that might be relevant to them, which were released since their last visit. The same goes for any tournaments they are likely to enjoy. They also expect on-site gaming content/promotions to be tailored to them. Overall, they want to feel like their gaming preferences are taken into account.
Therefore, we’ve been undertaking several initiatives to further customise our gaming experience, including improving the personalised game lists, or improving game search and subsequent filtering options. We’ve been improving and customising the logic for promoting new games. We’re ensuring that we are not repeating inaccurate recommendations to customers and optimising the use of on-site promo areas by regularly updating content with relevant calls to actions for players.
We’re leveraging our AI capabilities to further personalise the experience. Recently, a totally personalised casino lobby moved a step closer when a new and improved algorithm was deployed to the Unibet casino lobby’s burgeoning ‘recommended-for-you’ section.
Results so far and the road ahead
Happy customers:
With the ‘Play Gaming’ experience having been set up last year, the new model has already delivered some promising results. The satisfaction Kindred customers have with playing casino has improved by +6 points since Q4 2018 (from 72.4% up to 78.4% in Q4 2020).
The satisfaction Kindred customers have with playing live casino has improved by almost +8 points since Q4 2018 (from 77.1% up to 84.7% in Q4 2020).
Next steps:
The transformation Kindred underwent in 2019, organising the core delivery process around seven experiences, including the ‘Play Gaming’ experience, has helped us to better understand and track shifting player expectations and adapt our products accordingly. This creates optimal conditions to keep improving our gaming experience moving forward.
