Your Marketing Team Needs a Decisioning Layer, Not a CRM Migration

When an operator wants to get more from its existing player base, the CRM is an obvious place to look.

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Are we using everything it can do? Do we need more automation? More journeys? Better segmentation? Or has the time come to replace it altogether? But in many cases, the CRM isn't actually the problem.

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Most established CRM platforms are already very good at execution. They can build journeys, trigger communications, deliver offers and execute activity across multiple channels. Replacing one with another might improve certain parts of that process, but it doesn't necessarily address the bigger question:

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Are we making the right decision for each player in the first place?

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That's where we think the real opportunity sits.

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CRM and decisioning aren't the same thing

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CRM teams make an enormous number of decisions. Who gets an offer? What should that offer be? When should it be sent? Which channel should be used? Should a player receive a different message instead? Should they receive anything at all? Traditionally, much of this has been managed through segmentation and rules.

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That approach has worked for years, and good CRM teams have become incredibly sophisticated at it. The issue is simply scale. Take three players sitting in the same segment. On paper, they might look similar enough to receive the same campaign. Look at them individually, however, and the right commercial decision could be completely different for each. For one, a bonus might be the right action. Another might only need a message. The third might be better left alone.

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You can keep creating smaller and smaller segments to try to account for those differences, but eventually you hit a practical limit. There are only so many rules, journeys and campaigns a CRM team can build and manage.

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This is where a decisioning layer changes things.

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Rather than replacing the CRM, it sits above the existing setup and determines the most appropriate action at an individual player level. The CRM then handles the execution.

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The CRM delivers the action. The decisioning layer works out what that action should be.

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Why changing CRM doesn't necessarily solve the problem

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Moving CRM platforms is a big decision. There are integrations to rebuild, journeys to migrate, teams to retrain and development resources to allocate. Even with a good implementation, it takes time to get everything working as intended. Sometimes that investment is necessary. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for an operator to change CRM. But generating more NGR isn't automatically one of them.

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You can move to a newer platform with more functionality and still face the same fundamental challenge: deciding what to do with each player.

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If the new setup is still largely based around teams building segments, defining rules and deciding which campaigns those segments should receive, you've improved the machinery without necessarily improving the decisions.

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That's an important distinction.

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Getting more from what you already have

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That's the problem Axom Gaming was built to address.

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We don't think operators should have to replace perfectly good CRM technology just to improve player-level decisioning. Axom Gaming works with the existing CRM and data setup, determining the most commercially appropriate action for each individual player. That could mean an offer. It could mean a different type of communication. It could also mean doing nothing. And that last point matters.

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Good optimisation isn't about finding more opportunities to give players bonuses. It's about understanding where promotional spend is likely to generate incremental value and where it isn't. The objective is ultimately commercial: generate more NGR from the existing player base while making better use of promotional spend.

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Putting it to the test

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Of course, saying better decisioning should improve NGR is one thing. We wanted to know what happened when it was put up against an operator's existing approach.

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We did exactly that with 888Africa.

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A three-month pilot compared Axom Gaming's player-level decisioning against 888Africa's existing approach. Both sides used the same underlying data and the same CRM setup. The variable was the decision-making. The difference grew over the course of the pilot, reaching 18% higher NGR than the existing 888Africa approach by month three.

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The important point isn't just the 18%. It's how that uplift was achieved.

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Same data. Same CRM. Better player-level decisions. 18% higher NGR.

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It was achieved without changing the CRM or introducing a new data setup. The improvement came from making better player-level decisions with what was already there.

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Look at the decision before you look at the platform

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There will always be reasons to invest in new CRM technology. Platforms evolve, requirements change and operators outgrow systems. But if the objective is to generate more NGR from existing players, changing the CRM shouldn't automatically be the starting point.

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First, look at how those decisions are being made.

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How much still relies on broad segments? How many rules are teams maintaining? How much promotional activity is based on assumptions about groups of players rather than the likely value of acting on an individual?

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That's where we believe the next big improvement in CRM performance will come from.

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For operators looking to get more from their existing player base, the answer may not be another CRM platform. It may be adding the intelligence to make better decisions with the technology they already have.

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If you’d like to understand what a decisioning layer could do with your existing CRM and player data, get in touch with the Axom Gaming team and we can talk you through it.