SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Vahan Sahakyan, CRM Product Owner at Digitain, writes for SBC News about how the sports betting software provider has been developing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for “quite a while” – to improve both its internal processes and the customer experiences of its partner network.
Currently, we are focused on three main areas: customer insight, CRM and customisation.
With customer insight we provide our partners with a range of automatic alerts, based on our AI algorithms, for customers who are identified as potential risk from a trading, AML and responsible gambling perspective.
Responsible gambling is an important issue, and will remain so, and our use of AI in this area – although at an early stage – can help our partners remain compliant and also prevent negative consequences of problem gambling.
Our machine learning systems can identify and alert operators to any risky gambling patterns, assess risks based on the historical data and potentially personalise preventive measures and communications to individual customers.
The AI information has been “trained” on at least one year’s data for over 100k customers, using 25+ data points and at least 4 million transactions – and is continually updated and improves over time with our machine learning technology.
For new operators it takes a week for us to train the algorithm for any changes we have to make considering country / market variations.
At the moment we provide AI alerts to our partners to various coefficients associated with the above behaviours and leave it to them to decide what the next steps should be, as these are their customers, although our data could allow for our systems to make a range of automatic decisions if our partners wished.
Use of AI in our new CRM system will allow our partners to send a range of offers and information to individual customers in real-time, including recommended bet and promotional offer opportunities, even during a live match.
The recommendation engine aspect of our CRM platform has the potential to increase our partner’s customers’ lifetime values through more efficient targeting of bets, bonuses and promotions. There’s an obvious cost benefit through savings on marketing headcount also.
Customisation of betting and gaming products presented to individual customers is an area that has been discussed for a long time. We’re developing a system, using AI, to allow our partners to customise the display to their individual customers – sports, promotions, banners, and even specific slots suppliers and games – all based on big data analytics.
Overall, we’re very excited by the progress we have made so far, and our research project group will continue to develop new solutions. We believe that there are plenty of opportunities to add real value for our partners, generating additional revenues, saving significant costs and improving the overall, safe customer experience through the use of AI.
