How mobile-first and multi-channel are revolutionising the industry

They are the egaming sector’s most popular boardroom buzzwords, but how are they changing the way operators are run?

Rumour has it that the industry’s two most high-profile attempts to better integrate mobile into broader retail and online ecosystems were first conceived in pubs. William Hill’s Project Trafalgar and Ladbrokes’ Project Nelson may evoke grandiose naval military strategy, but are actually named for the local boozers where management decided that sprawling retail, online and mobile empires needed to be brought closer together.

Of course the pub – a prime location where a punter might place a bet over mobile – is an apt battleground for two industry titans looking to turn egaming’s hottest buzzwords into something tangible on the bottom line. With most operators in the UK returning close to 50% of revenues from the mobile channel, and much of Europe fast catching up, offering a full product set across multiple channels and treating mobile as the primary point of contact with users can longer be classed as innovative thinking.

But while there is no doubting the importance of being adapted to mobile and ensuring your offer is available to customers on the devices and channels they use, pinning down exactly how mobile-first and multi-channel can change the way teams work, products are rolled out and operators are run is a trickier proposition. “I hear the term mobile-first getting bandied around and it seems to mean different things to different people,” Richard Downey, director of mobile at The Mobile House, says.

“A company can be mobile-first in how it produces and develops products. It can be mobile-first in how it concentrates its marketing and acquisitions activity. Or it can just mean bringing up the standard and the quality of mobile products to match that of products on other platforms.”

Caught up in a disruption which promised almost unknowable growth potential, most operators forgot to ask themselves one important question: how does mobile fit in with the rest of our business? Three or four years on and operators are now facing some serious legacy issues.

Mobile sites may run on completely separate platforms to desktop sites. Independent mobile development, product and acquisition teams might not be communicating with the rest of the business. Attempts to develop cohesive, company-wide strategy become labyrinthine undertakings. It was HTML5 which kicked off the mobile-first revolution and opened up the possibility of operators producing a complete integrated offering on mobile.

CORE was among the first developers to commit to HTML5, and Justin Chamberlain, CEO at CORE Gaming, says it finally gave operators the ability to serve the same product on all channels. “Prior to that, everyone including ourselves had developed and delivered games to desktop in Flash. There was a consensus at the time that HTML5 wasn’t powerful enough to give a good gambling or gaming experience. We basically set out to prove that wrong.”

KEEPING IT SIMPLE

While multi-channel and mobile-first have provided operators with an opportunity to pursue some genuine innovation, it is really about delivering a core experience in a way which doesn’t jar with customers. “The aim of the game with multi-channel is to give the customer the same experience and to give the same product regardless of whether they’re in a shop, on their computer or on their phone,” Downey says.

In practical terms this means getting the basics right. If your casino launches a new slot, don’t heavily trail it only to disappoint half the user base because it isn’t available on mobile. Ensure the look and feel of your desktop site matches that of your mobile website and native applications. And above all, ensure everything is optimised.

“There’s definite challenges around multi-channel in terms of user experience and making sure you don’t try and shoehorn the user experience desktop into mobile,” Daniels says. “You can’t just go for the lowest common denominator and so technically there are a lot of challenges.”

Many of the challenges are a hangover from the early days of mobile when new platforms were rushed out with little concern for how they would fit into wider product offerings. “The technical debt left over from the early years is going to slow people down,” Daniels says. “Four or five years ago we did things one way but if you could start again you wouldn’t do it the same way now. The technology has moved on and user behaviour has moved on. But those platforms were built and now they have to be adapted. It’s much easier to build a platform from fresh than adapting it to do something different that it wasn’t intended to do in the first place.”

This is an extract from eGR Mobile Intelligence issue 23