When US states began legalizing online gambling five years ago, the sector was a land of unexplored opportunity. Fast forward to today, however, and companies are jostling for space and the chance to win over players in a market valued at $63.5 billion in 2022.

Today, a player can choose from hundreds of iGaming platforms. Why would they choose yours? The answer is to craft a superior player experience. And one of the best ways to do it is with software that streamlines your customer retention strategy without breaking the bank. 

This is where Salesforce Service Cloud comes in.

If you want to know how Salesforce can keep your online iGaming audience coming back to you for more, read on. We’ll discuss the best Salesforce features for an iGaming business and show how they work to improve customer loyalty. But first, let’s take stock of where you might be right now.

Customer loyalty in iGaming: the challenges

As an iGaming business, your main customer-related challenges are dealing with complaints and keeping players engaged in a highly competitive and regulated market. Support services can handle these issues, but only if they manage to overcome the following challenges. 

Address customer concerns in real-time is hard

In a recent industry survey, 75% of online sports betting customers had encountered an issue that prevented them from placing a bet at least once in the past 12 months. What’s more, 40% of bettors stated that their next action, if they couldn’t place a bet, would be to switch apps.

Why? Gambling and iGambling are industries where time means money, especially in sports betting. It follows that any problems that prevent customers from playing should be fixed immediately. But when you don’t use automation and self-service options to help players, you can easily get overloaded by requests, and real-time support suffers. 

Customer service is often inefficient

The situation gets even worse when your customer service can’t solve customers’ problems at all. 

This can be due to

  • Insufficient product knowledge and staff expertise 
  • A lack of tools to quickly access customer information, find solutions, and apply them
  • A lack of instructions for using available tools

These things all lead to a breakdown in customer support. Even if an agent eventually fixes an issue, the process is often tiresome and irritating — the customer contacts support service several times and answers the same questions from different agents. As a result, customer satisfaction drops. Players switch to your competitors, possibly leaving a devastating review behind them. 

Customer data remains untapped

As the old saying goes, whoever owns the data owns the customer relationship. Tracking and analyzing customer data is essential if you want to improve player experience. 

For example, you can use data to

  • Determine patterns of customer behavior and provide the best offers, marketing messages, and promotional activities at the most relevant time.
  • Segment customers by interests, spending, and other parameters to offer tailored loyalty programs.
  • Pinpoint common support issues and requests as the basis for a knowledge base or other self-service options.

Still, data collection and analysis aren’t easy. And when you fail to do them well, you miss the opportunities and end up working in the dark.

Real-time customer service, poor resolution rates, and a lack of data analysis are three big problems you may be facing in your iGaming business. Fortunately, you can solve them all by applying Salesforce Service Cloud features to an iGaming platform.

How you can use Salesforce Service Cloud for iGaming 

Salesforce Service Cloud has multiple features for iGaming platforms that can help you improve your CX. Here are the most common ones.

On-site messaging 

On-site messaging is a must for giving customers easy access to support services. With the Salesforce Digital Engagement extension, you can provide several communication channels,  including WhatsApp, Facebook, webchat, and phone. On the service side, the extension keeps things simple by integrating all channels into one and intelligently assigning tickets according to agent experience and workload. 

CRM for better customer experience

Salesforce collects, sorts, and stores all information on customer interactions in one place, making it available to agents in just a few clicks. As a result, customers don’t need to repeat information to every new agent, problems get solved faster, and callers are more satisfied with their interaction. 

Self-service options 

Salesforce Service Cloud offers multiple self-service options — essentially a magic wand that saves time for both customers and agents. You can create an easily manageable and searchable customer knowledge base to include instructions for fixing common problems, set up an AI-based “next best action” tool, or integrate chatbots to answer common customer requests. With 81% of customers wanting more self-service options, adding any of these solutions increases customer satisfaction and frees up agents to solve more challenging requests. 

Knowledge base

Salesforce supports the creation of clear procedures and comprehensive customer service guidelines with knowledge base tools that centralize your company’s experience. The systems intelligently suggest articles for agents based on the current request, thus reducing resolution time and increasing CX. 

Player segmentation 

With Salesforce, you can easily collect player-related data — such as spending, play time, and interests — and segment players into categories like VIP players or players with declining activity. The platform can then automatically send messages and bonuses tailored to each category to improve customer loyalty in iGaming. Automation ensures that relevant promotional activity reaches every customer.

Analytics on customer behavior and support service performance

Salesforce gives you insights into every aspect of how players engage with your platform and marketing campaigns (for example, through email opens, clicks, and unsubscribes), as well as their gaming performance. With accurate data, you can optimize your marketing initiatives and game updates and easily find ways to improve. 

Salesforce analytics also help you track support service performance to optimize workflows and pinpoint the most common customer issues. 

These are just some of the benefits of using Salesforce Service Cloud in your iGaming business. However, they’re only available if you have expertise in setting it up or can hire an experienced vendor.

Why expertise matters for Salesforce consulting services 

Salesforce’s built-in features and apps provide almost unlimited opportunities to improve your customer experience in iGaming. Yet Salesforce consulting companies with limited experience can choose tools that don’t bring iGaming platforms to their full potential. This is why vendor experience is key when choosing a company to integrate Salesforce with your iGaming business.

At Newage, we have over seven years of experience providing Salesforce implementation services that have brought significant client results. 

As an example, we carried out Salesforce Cloud Service implementation for BlueChip, a global iGaming platform with over 3150 games. We used Salesforce tools to integrate an omnichannel messaging service with BlueChip’s website, tied the back-office casino data to a CRM, and set up a system that assigned players to particular employees to personalise communication and improve service quality. These changes led to many successful outcomes for the client: 

This is just a taste of what happens when we combine our team’s expertise with the amazing features of Salesforce software. If you’d like to achieve similar results, contact Newage for Salesforce implementation consulting, and let’s build something great together.