It is widely acknowledged that there is no rest for the wicked, so while normal people enjoy their Santa-time, we were asked to conduct a 2-day training session with the Conversion & Retention teams of one of Hybrid Interaction’s largest clients. You know us – just give us a chance to talk and you will have to drag us out by the end of the day :) No wonder we have picked up on consulting as our line of business…

So what caught our audience attention?

We first ensured all representatives shared the same level of knowledge when it came to understanding House Advantage. This is indeed the basic foundation to understanding online gambling business’ profitability, so we can talk about 1 out of 37 straight bets in roulette equaling  2.7% edge against the player all day long (forget it Thomas, we are not going through the nightmare of watching you miserably try counting to 37 again… the humanity!).

Once we got that right, we discussed other games and their relative payout ratios, and how keeping a steady gaming pattern could be represented as the expected loss over time:

We than explained the differences between being the casino and play vs. the player,  versus owning a poker room and charging players for services. We continued onward to detail the legal issues the iGaming world faces, before discussing in-depth how it all begun and who are the key players in this arena.

We can’t obviously disclose the internal procedures discussed and the generated retention marketing strategies. However we can definitely share our impression from those young, bright representatives and what they had to say about their routine, scope and position within the entire company functionality.

It was fascinating to see them obsessed with quite a major issue: how can a company maintain high levels of profitability within a regulated market? And working in the intelligent side of the business, they were of course interested also at how they could push promotions under a taxed turnover (or overall stake/wager/bet) environment?

We are eager to hear your thoughts as well since this is truly one of the most interesting hurdles that we, loyalty people face these days. Be a sport and comment!

IMPORTANT: Due to the growing demand, we have switched the location of our London CRM Networking Party to a larger venue. Date / Time remain the same (2^nd day of iCE, JAN 25, 2012 @ 1800. If you have already registered, you should be getting a formal invitation sometime after mid-January. If you haven’t, we would love to recommend few materials to enhance your preferred pastime activity.