Cementing Relationships with Your Bettors with AI-Based CRMs

With widespread competition in the sports betting market, building strong and long-term relationships with your bettors has become a must for any operator. When it comes to Customer Relationship Management (CRM), we see a growing focus on automation of lead generation and customer retention activities. Artificial intelligence is an efficient tool that can help sportsbooks secure their relationships with existing and potential clients.

AI-driven CRM systems help operators personalize communications with bettors, drive valuable insights and predictions for bettors’ behavior, and align their marketing efforts to nudge bettors to make more or bigger bets and to try bets in sports where they historically haven’t.

Capturing the Entire Bettor Lifecycle

The betting industry is highly complex and dynamic, and your organization requires technological solutions to collect real-time and accurate data as bettors make their wagers. AI-based CRMs help to transcribe entire conversations, understand the lifestyle of a bettor, and establish comprehensive player profiles; which include the demographic information and each action performed by a particular bettor.

An example is Fast Track CRM’s Singularity Model. The platform uses real-time observations and AI capabilities to create an extensive profile for each bettor and advances bettors’ journeys by offering original content based on what has been learned about individual players.

Increasing Data Accuracy

Another benefit of AI-driven CRM is that it helps maintain data accuracy. Artificial intelligence systems can detect irregularities, anomalies, duplicates, and other errors that compromise the integrity of CRM data. Studies have shown that 91% of data collected through CRM systems is incomplete and that 18% is duplicated content. On average, cleaning messy CRMs costs $60,000 a year. This scenario presents a major headache for betting companies who would wish to upsell, cross-sell, and prevent customer attrition. AI-driven CRMs help you avoid cost and time overruns.

Predicting Bettor Behavior

AI-based CRM can also provide powerful predictive analytics via historical statistics, data-mining, game theory, and other methods. An example of such a platform is Optimove’s Mapping CRM Solution. This solution leverages statistical and mathematical techniques to micro-segment bettors based on historical and transactional data and allocate them into micro bases.

The micro-segmentation is dynamic and continuous. The main idea behind this is that behavioral patterns of individual bettors change over time and that each bettor’s data is critically important to build precise predictions on the future actions of the entire micro base.

Personalizing at Scale

Over-communication is one of the major issues that sportsbooks face today. If bettors constantly see the same messages, bonuses, or loyalty program offers from different operators, how will they choose which is best for them? In our recent interview, we spoke with Joseph Solosky, Managing Director of Sports Betting at NASCAR, about over-saturation of sports bettors:

“I know it is a concern on the broadcast side no matter what sport or what league you are talking about — is the over-saturation. There is a good example this year of what NBA and ESPN have done, with having kind of a second screen opt-in for sports betting with the BetCast for NBA games. So instead of just oversaturating your fans and saying that “here is the updated prop for Trey on hitting a three is the next score,” — that can be on another feed, so you are not alienating a fan base who may not be interested in betting.” — Joseph Solosky, Managing Director of Sports Betting at NASCAR.

Matthew Shatz, Advisor to the Board at DataArt added:

“I think that is really smart and actually really important because almost by definition or certainly by common sense, over-saturation, is going to mean something completely different to one section of the audience compared to another. I mean, some hardcore fans cannot get enough of betting, it might be the only reason they are tuning in, and it may take a long time for the fans of the sport that have no interest in ever placing even a small fun wager and just want to enjoy the sports for sport’s sake. So I think trying to find a way to separate those things out as opposed to trying to find a balance in between those two groups makes a lot of sense.”

AI-based CRMs provide smart bettor segmentation capabilities to help you detect different groups and provide a highly personalized betting experience. So instead of mass mailing bettors with generic offers, you can market them directly at the appropriate time and across the relevant channels with the most engaging content.

Fast Track provides such capabilities by using pre-built templates for each bettor segment. The Singularity model determines which content should be sent to each bettor introducing them to new sports or stimulating them to bet more or undertake in-play betting.

Mining Emotions

Operators struggle to cultivate trustworthy bonds with their bettors. One of the principal challenges has been the inability to comprehend virtual customer interactions because modern platforms tend to conceal facial expressions and body language. AI-driven CRMs can analyze text through sentiment analysis. The general idea is to capture bettors’ emotional states, which empowers the company to respond effectively.

For instance, SugarCRM matches customer text and verbal messages collected from emails, calls, and online chats to uncover their emotional state. Sportsbooks can detect when bettors’ perceptions regarding their offers change, examine trends, and gain visibility into whether there has been a rise or a drop in the number of bets placed or in the number of loyal bettors.

Automated Future

We are moving towards the creation of self-learning engagement platforms that will change the sports betting industry. The goals will continue to focus on customer onboarding, retention, and reactivation. Using these three pillars, the company can upsell, cross-sell, prevent customer churn, and augment the bettor’s online experience.

By Russell Karp,
Vice President of Media and Entertainment Practice at DataArt