that is necessarily the right thing to do next. Tere may be another action that is far more relevant to that individual customer. Tat is the limitation of compartmentalising customers into journeys. Te system is effectively saying: "You meet these criteria, therefore this journey applies."


What we really want to ask is: "Given everything we currently know about this customer, what is the best thing to do next?"


Is that why you believe operators need to move away from thinking primarily about customer journeys and instead build a dynamic understanding of each individual player?


Yes. Journeys are useful organisational constructs, but customers don't behave like journeys. A customer can simultaneously be high value, showing signs of churn, interested in a new product, changing their playing behaviour and becoming more or less responsive to certain types of promotion. Tose things don't happen neatly one after another.


So instead of deciding which box the customer currently belongs in, the better approach is to continuously understand that individual and decide what action makes most sense given their current context. Tat is a very different way of thinking about CRM.


What does “dynamic understanding” mean in practice, and how is it different from the single customer view or increasingly granular segmentation operators already use?


A single customer view is important, but having the data and knowing what to do with it are two different things. Traditionally, a single customer view might tell you the customer's value, the games they play, their deposits, profit and loss, frequency of play and lots of other attributes. Tose fields may change over time, but the way they are used is often relatively static. Tey feed segments, models or predetermined journeys.


A dynamic understanding means continuously looking at those signals in combination and asking how a change in behaviour affects what we believe about that customer's future value and what we should do next. Te important part isn't simply having the 360-degree customer view. It is having a dynamic decisioning capability sitting on top of it.


If one thing changes, what does that mean for everything else we know about the customer, and does it change the action we should take? Tat is where it becomes much more powerful than increasingly granular segmentation.


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Once you have that understanding, how does optimising for lifetime value change the next-best-action decision compared with optimising for an immediate response, deposit or engagement?


It changes the time horizon. If you optimise for an immediate deposit or click, the obvious decision can often be to communicate now or put an incentive in front of somebody. But that doesn't necessarily maximise the long-term relationship. Tere is a lot of discussion about real-time CRM in gambling, but actually a huge amount of good CRM isn't about responding instantly. It is about understanding behavioural patterns.


Imagine a customer who normally plays blackjack or poker on a Friday night. Occasionally they lose a hand, stop playing and leave. You don't necessarily need to immediately react and say, effectively, "We've noticed you've stopped - come back." Tat may simply be completely normal behaviour for that customer.


Te more useful signal is when they start deviating from their normal pattern. So there is absolutely a place for real-time intervention, but there is also enormous value in understanding historical behaviour, normal playing patterns and predicted future behaviour.


Optimising lifetime value means choosing the action - and the timing - that is most likely to improve the overall customer relationship, rather than simply maximising the next response.


One possible action is to do nothing. With so much emphasis on real-time CRM and hyper-personalisation, are operators in danger of assuming better technology should mean communicating more frequently rather than making better decisions?


Definitely. For years, there has been enormous pressure in CRM to communicate more. How many customers have we contacted? How many campaigns have we sent? What are our competitors doing? How many times have we spoken to this customer this week? But that isn't how people behave.


If you repeatedly send somebody irrelevant messages, they don't necessarily unsubscribe. Often they simply stop paying attention. Once that happens, you've damaged the future value of that communication channel. I've heard the argument before that brands need to maximise their "mental availability" with customers. In CRM, I think relevance is much more important.


Relevance beats frequency. Sometimes the best possible action is doing nothing. Don't spend money unnecessarily. Don't send somebody an offer they don't need. Don't talk about something they have only a marginal interest in. Wait until there is something


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