Retail sports betting: How to unlock cutting-edge customer experiences

The modern landscape for consumer technology and entertainment can feel predominantly digital in nature.

This can be especially true in betting and gaming, where the vast majority of marketing efforts and advertising pushes centre around customers placing bets on their mobiles or digital devices. But although much of the attention is often placed on digital avenues for customer engagement, this attention should not come at the expense of recognising just how influential retail sports betting, and the right mix of betting retail solutions, can be in engaging today’s customers.

Today’s customers are shaped by their digital experiences. This brings with it an anticipation of speed and offering depth wrapped in an intuitive UI. With the right technology in place, land-based operators have every possibility of bringing online pace to the retail space and delivering unique experiences to their visitors.

Embracing technology and removing friction

In the same manner that long loading times and apps crashing are anathema to online betting, queues, friction and poor functionality can intensely limit the prospect of acquisition and retention in retail. This is equally true both in the casino environment and in retail stores – no customer wants to have their bet placement delayed or options limited due to a lack of hardware and inexpertly deployed sports retail betting architecture.

Physical locations can offer the same immersive and high-energy experiences as online, and the technology that serves them must feed into that. The right blend of digital signage, over-the-counter services and kiosks can drive greater dwell time and reduce queues during peak moments. This can be enhanced further through technology such as Kambi’s Bring Your Own Device, which lets customers build their bets anywhere and place them either at a counter or kiosk for smooth, frictionless bet placement that further streamlines the experience.

Together this makes the sportsbook somewhere customers want to stay, encouraging repeat bets and facilitating the creation of fully-integrated entertainment hubs for the viewing and enjoyment of the sports themselves. And those operators that fail to modernise their retail environments with state-of-the-art kiosks, user interfaces and signage risk driving customers back to purely digital channels.

Uplifting retail delivery represents a particularly impactful opportunity for land-based properties where the sportsbook shares the floor with many other amenities, such as casinos. Executed effectively, on-property sportsbooks can draw in new audiences and engage existing ones, lifting revenues across all aspects of the property such as food and beverage sales and table gaming. These elements can be harnessed to strategically coalesce and drive even greater customer loyalty – for example, providing a losing sports bettor with a free meal voucher in one of the property’s restaurants.

Delivering a true omnichannel experience that encapsulates not only the same look and feel as a brand’s online presence, but also affords (where regulation allows) complete synchronisation across accounts, wallets and rewards is key for successful retail sportsbooks. This also secures benefits on the operator side, with enhanced visibility of customer journeys and increased cross-channel engagement. The sportsbook can also include links with existing property loyalty schemes, further incentivising repeat custom.

Enhancing the player experience

Delivering best-in-class experiences at scale requires robust and flexible underlying infrastructure. The fundamentals of how Kambi’s retail technology has been developed are critical to enabling customer experiences which facilitate customer acquisition and enhanced retention. Retail logic is built on top of the online platform, delivering the same offering and UX as online users are accustomed to for a seamless omnichannel sportsbook, free of the friction which separate online and retail solutions risk introducing to the user experience.

The retail architecture is multi-tenant, which further supports Kambi’s efforts in elevating partners’ delivery. The UX and all key aspects of customer interaction can be tailored to match an operator’s brand identity, while product upgrades such as enhancements to the Bet Builder are rolled out to all partners at the same time – something which becomes increasingly complex on single tenant architecture as systems and technological frameworks diverge over time.

Kambi is equally adept at deploying these solutions as a fully-managed service – the approach often favoured by operators running casino properties – and as API integrations with pre-existing estates where the operator already has extensive hardware in place.

This has seen Kambi selected as the partner of choice both for major land-based casino operators such as Desert Diamond Casino and Mohegan Gaming & Entertainment, but also major lotteries and shop-based retail operators such as ATG, the Belgian National Lottery and Ontario Lottery & Gaming Corporation – most recently entering into a long-term partnership with multiple provincial lotteries to supply sportsbook technology and services across much of Canada.

In an increasingly competitive landscape, the future of retail betting will belong to those operators that blend digital sophistication with a physical presence that removes barriers and matches the distinct feel of their brand. The white space is there, and operators with the right technology partnerships in place give themselves the strongest opportunity to fill it.