Q&A: Buzz Bingo product chief on delivering omnichannel gains

Following a period of change at the top of the business, including former CEO Chris Matthews stepping down last year and being replaced internally by Dominic Mansour, Buzz Bingo is shifting.

The operator recently saw revenue for the 12 months to 14 January 2023 jump 40% to £195m, with an 8% uptick in online revenue to £30m alone. This online jump came as the operator continued to shift towards recreational players and improving protection methods in preparation for the white paper into the Gambling Act 2005 review, which was released in April this year.

Recently, Buzz Bingo promoted David Evans to become the firm’s new chief product officer (CPO), in a move that signals the firm’s intent to build on its online gains. Evans originally joined Buzz Bingo in January 2020 as digital operations director and has now stepped up to the C-suite for the first time in his career.

EGR caught up with Evans following his promotion, as the ex-Rank Group head divulges what is coming next in terms of product innovation at the omni-channel operator.

EGR: How are you settling into your new role as CPO at Buzz Bingo?

David Evans (DE): This new role is exciting for me as we’re bringing retail and online much closer together. We want to make sure we’ve got a singular customer experience for our players and really put the products and our customers’ play and enjoyment at the centre of what we do.

So, rather than having one staff member looking after bingo and slots for retail, and another looking after bingo and slots for online, we now have one person for bingo across the board and one person for slots. Staff get to bond and feel part of the products they’re running and, at the heart of it, the customer gets a better experience.

EGR: What is Buzz Bingo doing right when it comes to the omnichannel experience?

DE: We signed a new long-term contract recently with our partner Playtech, so fundamentally our technologies are predominantly Playtech across the board through ECM Systems. Over the past number of years, we’ve been joining up the channels where we can. We know some players who play in retail also play online, but the key goal for us is that they play with Buzz Bingo.

We’ve delivered initiatives to attract and retain customers: single wallet and single registration, which means a customer only needs to register once to be registered everywhere across Buzz. We join up the journeys, so from both a communications and CRM perspective, customers have only one voice they’re hearing from, not competing channels. Having worked in the industry for almost 20 years, I know we’re pretty unique with those two initiatives and we’re really proud of how we’ve delivered them.

EGR: How will Buzz Bingo build on that success and keep innovating, especially online?

DE: The next evolution for us within bingo is how we join games together between retail and online because it’s at that point that we can really drive prize money forward. And everyone who knows bingo knows prize money is king. What will it cost me? How much could I win? By having more liquidity, we can drive prize money higher and higher for certain games.

For slots and games, we’re doing a lot of work with one of our new partners Future Anthem, which is doing some great stuff in the industry around slot placement and personalisation of content specifically tailored to a player’s point within their journey. We also need to provide real-time engagement for those players who are not going to the promotion sections. So, through AI and our great partners Future Anthem and Playtech, that’s how we’ll innovate and differentiate moving forward.

EGR: What will be the next big innovation from Buzz Bingo?

DE: We’re trying to omnify the customer experience – a word that gets thrown around quite a lot – but in our roadmap, we want to have single-app experiences, we want to create single-bingo experiences, pooling together prize money, and make sure we’ve got the latest and best slot content, both online and in retail.

EGR: What can we expect from Buzz Bingo as we move into 2024?

DE: We’ve got some exciting plans around enhancing the innovation we’ve already delivered like live bingo, pool-liquidity gaming, the use of AI in our slots positioning and content delivery, as well as enhancing experiences through the native app like retail functionality that people can use for a single real-money gaming app. That’s certainly where our focus will be.