Reaching your global players – message on a single, scalable communication hub

Introduction

AWS provides solutions to address industry challenges, enabling customers to address the risk of potentially significant financial and reputational damage. This blog discusses how customers that have adopted Amazon Pinpoint have been able to deliver time-sensitive messages reliably and securely. Specifically, it can mitigate the risk associated with reaching players who have voluntarily self-excluded from marketing communications.

Regulated workloads in the betting and gaming industry refer to specific activities, systems, and processes that are subject to government regulations, oversight, and compliance requirements. The role of the gambling regulator is to ensure adherence to these requirements and maintain fairness, security, and responsible behavior within the industry. Regulators also exist to protect players, subject to their jurisdiction, by regulating the businesses that provide gambling services, imposing controls for operators, the Internet Software Vendor’s (ISVs) and players themselves. By way of example, the UK Gambling Commission (GC) is one such organization with the responsibility of regulating the individuals and businesses that provide gambling services in Great Britain. The UK GC and their counterparts across the globe regulate and license betting and gaming businesses to ensure they adhere to standards, and investigate and prosecute those that breach regulations and their conditions of licensure.

Player engagement

Player engagement in the Betting and Gaming industry refers to the level of involvement, enjoyment, and interaction that individuals experience when participating in various gambling activities. It encompasses aspects like personalized gaming experiences, social interactions, rewards, and challenges. Maintaining a strong relationship with players is vital for operators as it fosters loyalty, increases player retention, and drives engagement. Engaged players are more likely to return, deposit, and recommend the brand to others. Additionally, a positive operator-regulator relationship that promotes responsible gambling and regulatory compliance creates a trustworthy reputation, a key component for an operator’s long-term success in the industry. Player expectations and betting options are constantly changing and require operators to develop more engaging and sophisticated games to maintain participation and loyalty. At their core, they typically include:

Responsible Gaming

Proactively preventing messages being delivered to players that have self-excluded, mitigating the risk of incurring fines, and sending an SMS message for the purpose of interrupting gambling behavior or sending an email with guidance or support.

Transactional history

Sending statements of fact about the transactions that have completed and providing information to the player about the bets placed, and suspicious account activity. Send Real-time notifications that can include game results or betting odd changes. These can be delivered in multi-channel formats, subject to the player preferences.

Player Engagement

Deliver personalized notifications that are tailored to the gaming experience of the player. This can include games suggestions based on player’s preference, offering customized bonuses, or providing recommendations for in-game actions or new games. After confirming that a player is not on an exclusion list and opted to receive messaging with you can send notifications with bonuses and promotions offering attractive incentives to maintain player engagement. These can include welcome bonuses, free game access, and loyalty programs.

Account settings & Security messaging

This can be in the form of SMS to provide seamless account creation, onboarding verification and deliver one-time-passwords to accelerate player identification. Access codes can be delivered where a unique code is delivered to the player in a time sensitive window to provide access to a particular game.

Responsible Gaming

Operators face several challenges when it comes to maintaining player engagement while adhering to regulatory mandated responsible gambling standards, requiring they balance engagement and retention strategies with player well-being and safe-play requirements. A common challenge faced by operators is ingesting multiple self-exclusion lists to ensure self-excluded users do not receive engagement and retention offers. Operators do employ various activities, such as educational initiatives, such as providing players with information about responsible gambling, offering responsive customer support to address player issues and queries promptly, and use machine learning to identify problematic gambling and take proactive actions. It is also worth noting that operators collaborate with problem gambling support organizations to provide resources and assistance to affected individuals.

Players can also take decisive action themselves and are free to opt-out of all gambling notifications for a set length of time, usually between 6 months and five years. The gambling operators in that jurisdiction are required to observe this request by law or face million-dollar fines and reputational damage. With increased player participation, ensuring you have the right tools and services in place in critical, as highlighted by an AWS customer.

Betting and Gaming has become one of the fastest growing sectors in the last 20 years. Everyday millions of people use these platforms for their betting and entertainment needs. tombola recognize the importance of having a reliable and scalable outbound communication hub for engaging with and protecting our players. Reliable communication is essential for a safe, engaging and sustainable customer experience.

James Conway, Technology Director, tombola

How to build Player Engagement solutions in the Betting and Gaming industry with AWS

AWS offers robust solutions that can benefit the Betting and Gaming industry. With the challenges discussed in this blog, AWS provides the infrastructure and solutions necessary to address these challenges effectively.

In a series of blogs, we will be sharing how AWS and Amazon Pinpoint can support industry focused use cases. Other solutions in this series are;

• How you can use AIML and GenAI to create player recommendations to improve player engagement
• How you use Amazon Pinpoint for improved onboarding and user authentication
• Identify player trends and next best actions using Amazon Pinpoint and AIML

The first in this four-part series is how we are supporting customers with responsible gaming, and how they can mitigate the risk of contacting players that have chosen not to receive any more communication.

Amazon Pinpoint is a key service in this solution. Pinpoint is a purpose-built, customer engagement service with multi-channel capabilities, message delivery, management, and optimization. This allows AWS customers to send personalized messages, promotions, and notifications to users via various channels, through a single console. Customers view Amazon Pinpoint as their communication hub because they can consolidate the services and tools used for their outbound channels to just one. It becomes the central service for managing and facilitating communications between different stakeholders. It streamlines and creates efficiency for front and back-office teams as they are able to concentrate on the player’s experience. Customers are looking for an easy, optimized, and consolidated solution to manage their digital communications. Customers often have different services or tools for each communication channel, causing operational complexity that can lead to system issues, inefficiencies and breaches in regulatory obligations. Operators face issues when different teams and stakeholders have to sync between their customer data repository and these services and tools. Maintaining the integrity of these systems can be cumbersome and increase the risk in the event of a sync or systems error. By maintaining a single service for outbound communications and simplifying the customer data, you are able to innovate and deliver player centric solutions. Below we have provided a selection of use cases focusing on player engagement.

Responsible Gaming – Mitigate the Risk of Targeting Self-Excluded Players on AWS

Under the UK gaming regulations, operators are required to observe a self-exclusion list, managed by GAMSTOP. Amazon Pinpoint queries GAMSTOP’s API in real time before sending the message to a customer. The above is possible with the use of Amazon Pinpoint’s Campaign Hooks and Journey Hooks. Campaign and Journey hooks can be used for other use cases that require reaching out to a 3rd party service in real time, such as players’ balance check before sending a message. Gamstop has been used in this example but can apply to any self-exclusion site or an internal exclusion list.

Tombola, who operate the largest online bingo website in Europe, successfully adopted Pinpoint across all their territories said,

‘At Tombola, we needed a communication tool that helped us deliver on one of our core values: responsible gambling. Players can opt out of marketing communications from online gambling operators by registering themselves on an independent self-exclusion scheme. We needed a system that helped deliver consistency with evolving changing requirements and ensure, in real-time, we have the controls in place not to contact the wrong people. Amazon Pinpoint allowed us to consolidate the various communication systems we had deployed across territories and allowed us to continually evaluate the content and the recipients of our communication. Only Pinpoint’s system could keep up with our shifting requirements, so we can easily connect with the players who want to hear from us, but never contact those who had self-excluded.’

About the Authors

Richard Perez

Richard Perez is a Principle Go-to-Market Specialist for Communication Developer Services at AWS. He enjoys diving deep into customers’ issues and helping to deliver communication solutions. In his spare time, he enjoys watching and participating in sports, and reading historical novels.