Although operators divert significant funds to advertising, promotions and affiliate marketing in order to drive customers to their products, much of this is wasted due to customer abandonment, according to a report by HooYu.
In a recent SBC Webinar hosted by HooYu entitled ‘Stop Losing 30% of Customers at Sign-Up and Improve Your KYC Journey’, two experts on customer onboarding detailed the ways in which betting and gaming operators can reduce player abandonment during the registration process.
In the webinar, the HooYu Marketing Director, David Pope, and Head of Gaming, Martin White, discussed why customers become disengaged during registration, at which point in the sign-up process operators experience highest drop out levels, and the most common mistakes made by operators during onboarding journeys.
Other topics of discussion included solutions on major KYC and customer onboarding issues, as well as sharing advice on reducing leakage in the onboarding funnel and ideas on effectively leveraging digital KYC tools to diminish customer abandonment.
Popeoutlined how in the UK, the gaming industry ‘leads the way in terms of success of sign up processes’, with only 14% of potential customers lost following KYC procedures, whilst large operators perform most efficiently at driving value to the top of the ‘funnel’.
Larger operators have a better success rate with regards to KYC, due to greater allocation of resources as well as numbers of agents dedicated to customer onboarding, in addition to monitoring and interacting with people who may drop out of the process.
Pope stated: “I think gaming has always led the way in terms of new technologies, increasing your experiences, so it doesn’t surprise me to see the gambling sector up there in terms of having the lowest dropout rates.
“I also think that’s probably a factor of the fact that KYC gaming and sign-up is mainly an age verification process as opposed to something that’s a full AML and KYC process for the financially regulated sector.”
White went on to provide a comparison between onboarding and KYC procedures by British operators and those in the rest of world, highlighting how the abandonment rate increases to 30% outside of the UK, partly as a result of longer KYC turnaround times due to the complexity of local markets.
“The UK database is, for lack of a better word, head and shoulders above what’s available on other parts of the world, and when you have a small operator, you might not necessarily have your local teams in those markets,” he remarked.
“You might have a UK centralised team that is trying to deal with the complexity of local markets, which can have a real slowing effect on the onboarding process.
“We need to ask how companies can make up for the difference between the UK and non-UK journeys. Part of this re-communicating to your customers why you need to harvest more information from them in the first place and really making them understand that you need this data to achieve their sign-ups properly, and educating them on the reasoning why.”
