Online customer analysis boosts gambling revenues

Paddy Power, Ireland's biggest and most successful bookmaker, has extended its contracts with online customer experience analyst Speed-Trap.

The new contract - valued in excess of GBP100,000 - will enable Paddy Power to further develop its eight commercial websites using active, live data collected from the site to fine tune its presentation on the sites, to understand how best to interact with its customers and how to increase revenues and improve online customer experiences.

The new Speed-Trap contract includes annual software licensing, training and ongoing support services.

Paddy Power launched its online gambling website seven years ago and the online channel now accounts for over 50 per cent of its profits.

Speed-Trap was brought in two years ago to help provide more intelligent analysis of customer usage of the site and to help Paddy Power to be more strategic about the way it develops the site and launches new services.

Stephen Lovell, content user experience manager at Paddy Power, commented: "One disadvantage of an online business is that you lose an opportunity to talk to your customers face-to-face with detailed information about their online behaviour; we can now gather some of that feedback indirectly".

Lovell continued: "Before we had Speed-Trap's clear data trails we constantly had to second-guess our customers and what improvements were needed on the sites.

"With Speed-Trap in place we are now confident that site development is not a gamble but a sure bet".

Lovell added: "The online gambling industry has been growing rapidly and we were lucky in that we were able to carry out a lot of instinctive, gut-feel business decisions.

"However, as the industry becomes more crowded and competitive, organisations need to be more educated in their decisions and use facts to drive their decisions - it's a bit like studying the form rather than pin-sticking.

"The analysis provided by Speed-Trap cannot even be put in the same category as what is offered by traditional web analytics providers; Speed-Trap offers far more insightful analysis about customer profiles, habits and trends.

"Speed-Trap can build a genuine end-to-end picture of a customer's journey through the site, telling us where, when and how they bet - with this information we can make far more accurate and conclusive judgments about how our service should be modified to maximise existing usage and increase potential users.

"Speed-Trap played a fundamental part during the re-skin of Sports Book helping us to improve speed, usability and functionality of the site, ultimately resulting in an enhanced customer experience".

Speed-Trap initially helped Paddy Power to launch its fully transactional Sports Book function but is now responsible for monitoring between 70 and 80 per cent of customer activity on the site.

A primary goal of the new contract will be to provide 100 per cent coverage of the website.

Speed-Trap can show exactly which routes through the site are operating well or poorly, which links are used most often and the ease of navigation.

This information is vital for any decision-making for any site development, ranging from entire new skins and formats or even relocating certain buttons to improve accessibility.

Paddy Power has embraced the quality of service and reporting from Speed-Trap and uses Speed-Trap reporting across all sections of the business and the results of Speed-Trap analysis played a prominent part in the last financial company report.

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