Customer retention: the growing importance of building an online community

There’s much excitement in the world of sport with top-tier football set to return in the next couple of weeks but, to be honest, I find the start of the season to be a little conflicting. There’s such a big focus on customer acquisition within our industry, that I feel some completely overlook the importance of engaging and retaining their existing customer base.

Let’s not forget that it costs more to acquire a new customer, than it does to retain an existing one. Today’s marketplace is increasingly complex with the worlds of sport, betting and media converging, and operators competing with other forms of entertainment for the attention of customers. Now more than ever operators need to nurture their existing customer base to realise their growth objectives.

One area that operators are paying particularly close attention to from a retention perspective is social betting. Traditionally betting, in Europe at least, has been a social pass time where customers visited their local betting shop to get their bets on. The advent of online betting, and more recently mobile betting, has changed that dynamic completely, and the process of placing a bet is now a solo endeavour.  

It’s something that the industry needs to address. As humans we have an innate need to connect, share and belong, and by tapping into this kind of primal instinct operators can effectively engage their customers. The introduction of social engagement solutions represent a shift towards an increasingly social betting experience. The integration of resources that allow bettors to connect with their peers and share the live sports experience by participating in conversation and friendly debate on betting content, pre-match build-up and on the pitch action will become more prevalent.  

Building a community

So, rather than leave the operator’s betting website to express an opinion about a sports match via social media, customers can share those views with other bettors in a chatroom on the operator’s website. This provides operators with some obvious benefits, such as increased website dwell time and customer engagement, but more importantly these social engagement features allow operators to build a community that customers want to be a part of and visit again.    

It’s important to stress that today’s solutions are feature-rich and provide operators with so much more than ‘chat functionality’. Customers can ‘react’ to a comment with an emoji or interact with a fan poll, while ‘cheer-meters’ highlight how fans are reacting to a particular in-game occurrence.

But where these social engagement solutions add real value for operators is in the bet sharing functionality. If one customer has a bet selection that they’re particularly keen on, they can share that information into the chatroom for others to copy. These organic interactions between customers stretch the bet discovery process, drives authentic engagement with betting and presents operators with a soft cross-sell opportunity.

I suspect there will be people in the industry who view social engagement solutions, the chatroom functionality in particular, as something of an operational burden and a potential risk to their brand, as previous tools of this nature have required operators to employ someone to manually monitor the chatroom and moderate the conversation for bad language, for example.

Providing a safe space for customers to engage and interact with each other is a key aspect of building a community that people want to belong to. Advances in technology and increased use of artificial intelligence (AI) allow operators to automate the moderation process. The AI is always learning and updating itself, to better understand what’s being said in the chatroom. Furthermore, the technology can implement key actions such as approving or rejecting content reported by users and putting temporary bans in place. It’s a process that the technology is able to complete at speed and with high accuracy.  

The move towards community and social betting reflects a deep-seated need to belong. We humans carry a primal instinct of seeking community and of belonging. By tapping into this human need for social connection and social interaction, operators can turn their passive audiences into active users – and with that comes greater opportunity.  

Blaž Zitnik joined Sportradar as technical sales manager in May 2017 and held responsibility for growing the company’s media products business. Since 2019, Zitnik has headed up the betting and entertainment tools team, leading a group of experts to engineer data-driven engagement and retention tools for Sportradar’s betting clients. Prior to joining the company, Blaž was product manager at TVbeat for two years, a startup disrupting TV ad market. He started his career as programme manager at the biggest private broadcasting company in Slovenia, PRO PLUS, where he stayed for 10 years.