William Hill adds gamification to enhance sportsbook engagement

William Hill has unveiled a new sportsbook achievements feature as the operator looks to replicate the success of gamification in other verticals.

The achievements page, which is currently in beta mode, was initially made available to 5% of desktop customers in December before going out to half of all desktop traffic in the last few weeks.

The new feature enables customers to earn points, badges and increase their rating based on their betting activity and completing certain tasks.

Customers can also compete against fellow punters via a leaderboard, which has approximately 2,500 sign-ups so far.

A William Hill spokesperson told eGaming Review the operator would assess the appetite for the feature but said the long-term vision was to make it available across all products and channels in the future.

“We know gamification is a good technique to increase engagement and it is more obviously present in gaming, but we wanted to test the hypothesis of whether it can increase engagement in betting and make it more fun and relevant,” the spokesperson said.

“We launched it as part of our Innovation programme, which uses lean methods and hypothesis-driven development instead of going full-scale with a product we don’t know is worth building,” the spokesperson added.

The operator recently ran a research project featuring a panel of approximately 200 people which provided positive feedback of the product but said they expected to receive tangible rewards.

“We are still investigating what appeals to customers and what is the best mechanism for them to redeem some of their achievements,” the spokesperson said.

“If it appeals to customers the aim will be to build in tangible rewards at the appropriate time based on customer feedback.”