During a time of lockdown for the majority of the globe, almost zero traditional sports to bet on and bonus restrictions in some jurisdictions, iGaming operators must find ways to communicate with customers and keep them engaged until we return to some sort of normality.
Customer retention, reactivation and loyalty company Enteractive specializes in this exact service, currently working with a huge client list of iGaming operators, making thousands of calls to customers every day. Even during lockdown.
“We have two major services, reactivation and activation and its basically through our reactivation cloud. Our big operators connect to the reactivation cloud and we perform calls to their customers. Its all to get that long-term loyalty and to get them back to the site and to chat to them and this has been done for over 11 years”, Mikael Hansson, Enteractive’s Owner and CEO, revealed.
Hansson is a firm believer that now is more important than ever to pick up the phone and engage with customers. His company has achieved enormous success in doing so, continuing to serve clients even when sports and bonuses are unavailable in the majority of cases.
“I think in these times its especially interesting because there’s not much to promote…We were even a bit worried before because we had to take our workforce remote and we at the same time had to call without sports and sports has always been the driving force here”, Hansson explained.
“People ask me, ‘if you don’t have sports, you don’t have bonuses, the customers will not come back, what are you going to have to offer them’? Well I always believed and I always said, it’s the actual relationship and personal touch and the conversation that’s important”, Hansson shared.
“In Sweden, for example, we can’t offer bonuses and the UKGC is very direct with don’t aggressively cross-sell, so we obviously follow that. We don’t throw a casino bonus on a sports player. If he asks about it, we guide him, yes, no doubt about that and its actually working out brilliantly”, he added.
Of course, there are sports betting customers who wish to wait until their favorite sport comes back before betting again, but this does not interfere with the service Enteractive provides. Despite the inevitable decrease in conversion rate, Hansson confirmed customers want to chat more during this time and appreciate the call regardless.
Hansson also praised his team for their flexibility in topics of conversation with customers, especially with sports betting customers when almost no sports are available.
“If there’s no sports, [my team] have to focus on casino and poker and the other stuff out there. It was difficult the first week because there was this feeling that you lost an argument, lost a way of communication topic that people like to talk about. But I’m super impressed by the guys…because what they did is nothing less than a super, super achievement”, he said.
Another huge achievement of the Enteractive team was to move their entire operations from a swanky office in Malta to working from home, all basically overnight and without any experience in working and making calls remotely.
“We have a wonderful office, a big media wall, we have our own sport bar, we really invested so much time and effort into our office”, shared Hansson.
“If you can’t do it that way, you have to adjust and adapt. So basically, what we’ve seen is that as everyone else is doing right now, you have to have meetings over Skype like we are doing today”, he said.
“You have to have them in structured ways so you don’t lose the daily touch and that we’ve done. And you have maybe come up with more fun competitions, more variation because its not as easy and when its not so easy, you’ve got to try harder. And we’ve even seen some guys actually have done better results sitting remote”, Hansson added.
“Some people actually have a bit of trouble, but that I think is based on the character. It is not for everyone to sit at home, but then again, some people get distracted by a vibrant office environment as well”, he admitted.
This time of lockdown has been and continues to be a time of learning of all of us. Perhaps we’ll come out of this with more efficient workflows, less budget spent on offices and traveling, new business strategies and the list goes on.
For Enteractive specifically, Hansson has finally had an opportunity to prove his theory that players simply enjoy a phone call from their favorite betting site.
“We have gotten some kind of a certainty into the fact that its not the bonus, its not the big event, its actually a phone call to reach out”, he said.
“I think maybe even more so now when people feel generally a bit nervous about everything and there’s been a lot of changes- maybe just to talk to someone, even if its from your sports betting brand- its still a human voice. And its like you say, the phone call has made a big come back”, Hansson added.
