PokerStars

Overview

In 2020, Flutter merged with The Stars Group and now covers over 10 global brands including PokerStars. As a group, they offer global sports betting, gaming and entertainment for over fourteen million customers worldwide. Their purpose is to deliver a vibrant and safe betting and gaming experience with continuous innovation across products, marketing and technology – with insight communities being one tool used to enable customers from all over the globe to be brought to life for colleagues and readily integrated into ideation and decision making.

Goals

establish consistent use of insights across departments

develop a customer centric product development strategy

improve customer experience

Business Challenge

The merger caused many departments to begin sharing resources and projects, across the different brands. It was during the process of joining forces they realised the need for insight communities that spanned all brands now part of Flutter Entertainment Inc. Since PokerStars had an active insight community, the expansion efforts grew from there. The main challenge they faced was getting buy-in from stakeholders across the wider business and making sure everyone knew of the potential power of the communities and the actionable insight they could provide.

Solution

The first step was to educate all department leads about the value of CXM and how customer insights would be pivotal to use to make major business decisions. Crash courses, refresher sessions and resources were distributed across the new brand family - and encouraged colleagues to rethink their contact with players. Then it came down to proving the worth by sharing the results and updates from the CX efforts across departments through the use of internal newsletters and a centralised hub where all research could be collated and accessed. Teams would also be made aware in regular feedback sessions, how much time had been saved in developing and testing products, as well as how much money was saved or earned as a result of incorporating insights. The access to this data was transparent and swift for everyone.

Results

PokerStars was able to successfully demonstrate that the use of customer insights had a positive effect on the wider company’s bottom line. Now, insights are used across many different and distinct departments, to build better and more effective products for all brands under the Flutter Entertainment umbrella. The leadership teams meet regularly to discuss how customer insights should be integrated into the decision process and what new products and services should be prioritised next.