BETTING ON DATA
With a customer churn rate that didn’t seem to be stabilising, despite its best promotional efforts, the TAB knew it needed to change tack. The Challenge
Last year the TAB found it was struggling to retain customers. This was surprising seeing as it was just coming off a string of successful new customer sign-up initiatives, which had generated recordbreaking levels of new customers. But analysis of the overall growth of its customer base showed despite strong new customer performance, the overall rate of growth of the active TAB customer base was sluggish. When it dug deeper to try and understand why this was happening, it found the churn rate among its new customers was very high. The TAB realised it had a fundamental misunderstanding of just how unpredictable its new customers were, assuming every new customer joined with the intent of becoming a regular. Though it had identified its problem, it still needed to find the cause and figure out why it was that these new customers were deciding not to stick around.
The Response
The TAB launched into action, conducting research to find out what the underlying issues were with its customer retention. It trawled through its customer data to identify traits among new customers that might indicate whether they would churn or not. It found two clues to its churn factor: that the customer’s account had only been used on one day; and that the customer hadn’t completed an ID check. The TAB then combined data analysis with 30, one-on-one, face-to-face interviews, which specifically set out to understand the pain-points and barriers facing new TAB customers. The interviews pointed to specific knowledge gaps for new customers, which were: the different sports they could bet on; the range of bet types; and additional TAB services like live betting and live streaming. Armed with this knowledge and the insights gleaned from its data research, the TAB completely changed the way it got new customers onboard. It created an interactive ‘onboarding’ experience called TAB Training, which, through training drills, specifically tackled the churn factors and knowledge gaps it had identified. The onboarding experience was an ambitious, highly technical project that transformed a previously onedimensional, email-based onboarding approach into a multi-channel, gamified and interactive experience. It used in-house resources to develop educational video content that was shown in the interactive onboarding, working with its bookmakers to get the best explanation for bet types and the different sports customers could bet on. Finally, its technology team played a big part in setting up the digital interactive onboarding experience. The process was fully automated, from eligible new account customers being loaded into the promotion, to direct marketing activity for invites and reminders, through to updates as each training drill was completed. To get it all working, it had to set up several two-way lines of communication between the TAB data warehouse, the promotion database and the marketing automation platform used for all communications.
The Result
TAB'S research approach worked. Throughout the period of 1 August 2017 to 31 March 2018, the TAB had 30,510 accounts established that were eligible to take part in TAB Training and 21.6 percent of customers invited to take part in the training joined the promotion. Retention rate increased and it exceeded the TAB’S target by 14.8 percent. It also saw an increase in ID verification rate for first-time bettors that took part in the training promotion, exceeding its target by 24.6 percent. The TAB also managed to increase the multi-bet trial rate for first time bettors that took part in the promotion, again exceeding its target, this time by a hefty 47.5 percent. The TAB’S success shows just how much data and research can turn a business around.