Improve Players’ Loyalty, Otherwise Company’s Value Drops – Shahar Attias, Hybrid Interaction

Offline operators often miss what’s right in front of them while online casinos are exposed to full details of players’ activity, believes Shahar Attias, Founder and CEO at Hybrid Interaction.

Shahar Attias is a famous gaming expert. He will become a speaker at the RGW Moscow where he will deliver a presentation “How to rank your operators player management efforts?” In the interview, Shahar Attias discussed CRM strategy and pointed out differences between online and land-based casinos. He also shared the most complicated case he has dealt with and gave tips on how to evaluate a gambling operator.

Interviewer: Russian Gaming Week Moscow (RGW)
Speaker: Shahar Attias, Founder and CEO at Hybrid Interaction (SA)

RGW: Hello, Shahar! What consequences will a gambling company suffer if its operator chooses an ineffective CRM strategy?

SA: Hi Alica! Well, that’s quite a terrible thought :) CRM, in a way, is the lubricant that makes Player Management keep on providing revenues to the operator. As such, if you don’t optimize your efforts in this regard, you will end up with earning sub-optimal Lifetime Values from your DB. And that’s very far away from sexy.

RGW: What are the most frequent mistakes made during CRM system configuration?

SA: The number one problem people usually do, is rushing to buy the system with the best PR, or the cheapest, or what they think is the best because 666bet or 69starz have purchased it. What they should do instead, is first of all analyze their own problems, attempt to operate quick fixes in a limited scale, and if it works – buy a system to help automate and expand the processes. I also happen to know a consultant that do exactly this kind of projects: helping companies to x-ray their own problems…

RGW: You have been engaged in gaming operations and marketing since 2001. What case appeared to be the most complicated in your practice? How did you deal with the problems?

SA: Excellent question. I had a client working with a terrible platform in the German market, and for years we have feared that if we will change the platform, we will be losing the loyalty of the large VIPs. So they have kept on banging their heads against the screen every morning, until mid-DEC 2017, in which their own platform decided to exit Germany, and left them with 2 weeks to find an alternative solution. Since they had no choice, they have signed a deal with the company that offered the quickest implantation, brought me over for a rush workshop over Christmas, and we were given with an option to start from scratch the entire CRM operation (even if it wasn’t really our decision to do so). 5 months later, if they “only” make in a week what they have used to do in a full month with the old platform – they consider it a very bad week. Amazing.

RGW: What are the key differences between online and land-based casino management?

SA: Most important difference to note is the fact that in online you are always exposed to full details of your players’ activity, across all perspectives. As offline operators aren’t used to deal with so many parameters, they often miss what’s right in front of them and keep rewarding players for secondary KPIs (such as visits), instead of basing their retention of profitability.

RGW: What are criteria to evaluate performance of a gambling operator?

SA: It’s a money based industry, so most importantly – LTV. But companies should forget that LTV, Lifetime Value, is composed of “Lifetime”, and if they fail to improve their players’ loyalty, their value will surely drop.

RGW: You will be a speaker at RGW 2018. What will your presentation be dedicated to?

SA: As an affiliate, on top of just acquiring new traffic, you also need to maximize your ROI by ensuring you send it to the best possible destination. In this session you will learn how the CRM teams of the operators actually work, as Shahar Attias will share quick tips that will help you to benchmark the operators you are working with, according to how much money they can generate for you from the players you send them.

Meet with the speaker, find out more about casinos and discover how to evaluate your operator at the conference!

Registration!