FORECASTING CANADIAN COMPLETIONS: A SYNERGY OF TRADITIONAL & MACHINE LEARNING RANDOM FOREST
BCLC PlayNow or PlayLater?
Why retention is costing BCLC millions
Executive Summary
OBJECTIVE
To increase BCLC’s PlayNow Sports player engagement and B.C. market share.
CHALLENGES
Subpar User Experience & Feature Gap
Weak Discoverability & Brand Positioning
RECOMMENDATIONS
Improve App UI (Retention)
Create Ads (Attraction)
Leaderboards (Attraction)
IMPACT
To increase BCLC’s PlayNow Sports player engagement and B.C. market share
Facts
Non-Sports Bettors
87% of PlayNow players are non-sports bettors
High-Value Bettors
Top 1000 players accounted for 80% of settled bets.
CHALLENGES
Challenge #1
High Player Lapse to Acquisition Ratio
10%
30%
Player Acquisition
Player Lapse
Why are players leaving?
Competitors
Essentially PlayNow is paving the road for other competitors to snatch
Voluntary Self-Exclusion
Bettors deciding not to play anymore
Death
Smallest proportion
Challenge #2
High dependency on Top 1,000 players
Top 1,000 players
The other 54,000 players
CAD
17,287
Avg. Monthly Spend
CAD
207.4 M
Total Handle
CAD
80
Avg. Monthly Spend
CAD
51.9 M
Total Handle
Avg. Revenue from
Avg. Revenue from
Top 1,000 top bettors
=
216 x
The other 54,000 non-top bettors
A large amount of the PlayNow Sports betting revenue comes in from the Top 1000 players, if BCLC loses them, they lose a huge chunk of their revenue stream
ISSUES
Issue #1
When drawing out a customer journey map, I quickly wanted to figure out how do sports bettors find out about PlayNow platform and I could think about three different routes potential bettors take. The first being a quick google search for “Sports Betting”. The reason why I made the search “Sports Betting” and not “PlayNow” is because it is unlikely for bettors to search for BCLC’s platform unless they are very familiar to it. When other competitors like Bet365, DraftKings etc spend heavily on advertising, name recognition isn’t great. To be honest since i do not indulge in sports betting, I’ve not once heard about PlayNow up until the time the project came live but I had at that time heard about Bet365 as well as Stake.
SEO on Mobile web Browser
When I did the search on Google, I was surprised to find PlayNow as the first result. Now of course this is sort of dependent on the location but still a great job done by the SEO team. Nothing more to be said.
When searching for the keyword "Sports bet" on Google
Desktop
Mobile
Bad Search Engine Optimization leaves a large portion of sports bettors unaware of the PlayNow platform
App Store Visibility Issue
Now knowing the google search results, I had high hopes for the App search visibility as well. Now Imagine my surprise when I saw this.
Click me
Speechless to see how PlayNow was not even in the search list. The question here is: are more people placing bets on the PlayNow App or on the browser. My bet would be on the app – its more convenient or atleast it should be. So knowing that how could the focus not be there for their main application. Did anyone bother to even check this. This is an error that is inexcusable.
Issue #2
Weak PlayNow Website performance
I felt there was a lack of care when it came to the platform, so my immediate thought was how well is their website performing in terms of speed. Owning and operating my own website had taught me a few tricks on page speed and optimisation , by no means would i be considered an expert so if it could pass my mini test then it was probably good enough. I felt a fair comparison would be needed to keep the comparison level, after all it wouldn’t be right comparing my website speed to PlayNow as PlayNow has a lot more images and objects. What would be a fair comparison is another sports betting platform like Bet365.
Again results were a bit shocking. There is a massive load time because of the large page size. Again a pretty big oversight because in this attention economy, people do not like to wait, PlayNow might be 500 ms too slow from someone staying.
1
Bad Overall Performance
Grade C (Play Now) vs. Grade A(Bet365)
2
Large Load Time
10 times longer to load Playnow vs. Bet365
3
Large Page Size
Due to uncompressed images
Issue #3
Not all sizes are equal
The web browser Play Now version and the app are not cohesive. It feels like 2 different teams designed them. Unfortunately, this is a reflection of the quality checks run within BCLC. Moreover, the design layout of a browser such as safari creates a lot more wasted space than just purely having the bettors open up the application.
Issue #4
Missing UI/UX features
When comparing the UI of Play Now compared to Bet365, so many features seemed to be missing or misplaced. For example, the signup button takes up a large area on top for Play Now which reduces the useful area. Sports365 does a great job attracting potential bettors to signup by using promos which offers a reward – a much better strategy. Additionally the icons representing different sports have colours that pop out and are easily identifiable. Besides this, there is also the availability of a search feature and I feel this is so valuable especially for bettors in more niche sports. If you were to use Play Now, you would have to do a lot of scrolling. The nail on the coffin however is the colour contrast; Somehow, the BCLC has dropped the ball in choosing appropriate colours for the App. Always keep the customer in mind, give them the best experience possible.
STRATEGY
Strategy Overview Flowchart
Gambling and other Vices
The Lottery and gambling such as Sports Betting is a tax on Stupid people. The truth is the odds are enormously stacked against you but it does give people the semblance of hope. Hope in the face a hopeless world; hope that one day they can make enough to not have to work in that job you hate or pay all your bills on time. In a culture that lives pay check to pay check, this dream is more real than the harder rote of grinding. Have I gotten seduced by this same hope? Yes and I have bought lottery tickets. Like I said it’s the tax on stupid people which includes me. So although this might be fun,
Be careful dear people.
So why am I giving out free strategies to BCLC?
BCLC is slightly unique in that they take the proceeds and directly give back to the province of British Columbia to support local communities. Gamblers are going to find one way or the other to gamble so besides finding them help, as long as they do not gamble away all their future. This tax that they are paying can meaningfully support and help others.
What I do have a problem with however is inefficient usage of public funds, funds that people pool into. Funds that should be there for the public but due to the large ungreased machine.
Flawed Strategy
BCLC has clearly been focusing on the wrong strategy. Spending millions of tax (Lottery) money on attracting new bettors while completely neglecting the user experience/interface of PlayNow has been identified as the point of failure. Instead more emphasis should have been placed on retaining their current player base and giving them an experience worth enjoying. The current player base has been dealing with the brunt of the lack of care from the BCLC PlayNow team who clearly understood the current player base wrongly as they hold the monopoly over being the only licensed gambling website. However, they underestimated the dynamic player base that does not value the switching costs to other sports betting websites. Whether these competitors are licensed or not, it is clear that the BCLC player base does not know or does not care to know.
People vote with dollars and t he sad reality is that BCLC has been inefficiently using its resources and due to the large bureaucratic nature of the organization even with the implementation of Agile, change is slow and its employees are content with the pace of progress. Change has to be a top-down implementation and strategy is something that has to be investigated carefully. Human nature is complacency and finding shortcuts if it is possible to get away with it is lost.
Improved Strategy
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
Sun Tzu
Retention Strategy
My strategy revolves around first giving the existing player base an experience that makes them want to stay on the platform in other words a Retention strategy. This is important because if you do not plug that hole, a lot of your existing player base will be lost, currently player lapse is at 30%. This is especially true for the top 1,000 bettors who are disproportionally contributing to the betting platform.
Once the bettor actually enters the platform, if they are completely new to betting, a guided tour would help elevate the experience.
Guided Tours
After creating the account and opening up the app, as a new account holder and a user with no betting experience op, what was on display was an ocean of buttons and options. I was quite lost in the process and due to cognitive overload and decision fatigue I thought of trying again another day. Keep in mind, I only decided to try again because this was testing was only executed as an experiment for a class project. Most new-time bettors would have closed the app and never gave it another shot.
This could have easily been handled by adding the option of a guided tour for newer users. Example shown below.
Such a simple yet overlooked solution by a huge team. It is not entirely their fault however, when you hire experts in the field, the organization develops “tunnel vision” – Something that might be so obvious to seasoned users is completely invisible or confusing to fresh users. This curse of knowledge creates a distaste in the minds and hearts of the newer player base. Never underestimate a set of “fresh eyes” in this situation.
Switching from Web browser to App
I next wanted to see how well the PlayNow website does if I try to open it on the web browser. To my surprise I was welcomed with an interface with a completely different colour theme. This is quite odd because corporate colours are followed consistently throughout an organizations systems – this is exemplified because these colours are a part of the companys’ identity. To mix these colours are to undermine its corporate identity. Again this is a complete oversight. It is very easy to blame the Brand / Corporate Communications Team but you don’t know what you don’t know. Only with clear intentionality can you go through and inspect your sitemap and figure out the kinks present in BCLC systems and applications.
The easiest way to figure this out is draw out a customer journey map and understand the different routes users take to achieve an objective. If you are too focused on developing a particular route and miss the larger picture, mistakes like this are bound to happen.
So firstly the colours should be fixed. Secondly, you do not have as much freedom with the mobile web browser interface as you do with your own app as you cannot get rid of the url search bar and other constants within the browser ribbon so another simple enough solution is redirection. You can easily redirect a user to switch from the web browser to the app, this allows you to maintain control and gain more insights and maximise your screen real-estate.
Custom Gaming Experience
So when I did get back to the app to actually try and dive deeper into the options, something I felt I was really missing out was something that showed me personalized choices of the games I was actually interested in. The large array of choices are quite overwhelming. BCLC can take a page out of Apple’s playbook, simplicity is king. From the outside, it always feels like it would be so impressive to show off your huge collection, analysis paralysis is a big problem in this low attention span society we live in. Better to quickly learn about a users choice and give them what they like. This is a common tactic used in websites like youtube to curate videos that are tailored to your likes and needs without wasting screen real-estate on content you are uninterested in. Now for the case of youtube where you are only fed content that you like, psychologically there is a huge issue but thats a topic for another day.
Custom Feed
Building upon the idea of custom content, wouldn’t it be a cool idea if you have a calendar with all the events lined up in the sports you selected on the favourite sports page. That way the user is kept in the loop about any major events happening and can plan better on how they choose to bet. Again really it is about keeping the users happy by enhancing the user experience. Are you delivering an experience that is much superior than their competitors and do they feel like this is the best platform there is to venture into Sports betting.
Allowing Tracking
When running competitive analysis between PlayNow and Bet365, what I noticed was the lack of tracking options lined up in the settings of PlayNow. This is rather odd because a lot of players will provide informed consent to some applications. This will allow admins to discover more insights about the playerbase. This is what data analytics is all about, more data, more insights you can gather and provide a better experience
