ROUNDTABLE


Alice Timson


Christine Parkhill


Holly Fairweather


Nadine Thys


The new face of iGaming account management: What has changed?


At the coalface of what makes an igaming business successful is its account managers, ensuring customers are satisfi ed with the service and helping to communicate their changing needs to the wider team. But the all-important face-to-face dynamic of these relationships has suffered deeply due to the events of the past two years.


G


IO spoke to the industry’s most accomplished account management teams including Nadine Thys, head of account management at Vivo


Gaming, Holly Fairweather, head of account management at White Hat Studios, Christine Parkhill, commercial director at Push Gaming and Alice Timson, head of client services at Realistic Games. They discussed how they maintained positive relationships with their clients during diffi cult times, and how their services have developed as a result.


GIO: How has account management in the iGaming sector changed in recent years? Specifi cally, in what ways did your account management team go above and beyond to keep clients satisfi ed as the restrictions of the pandemic grew worse?


Holly Fairweather: The past two years have seen our account management style change entirely. Before the pandemic, there was a great deal of emphasis on face-to-face meetings and entertainment. Account management is all about relationships, so the challenge became about delivering the same interesting and exciting service under dramatically different circumstances. For example, we held game demos online in smaller groups, so it was more interactive, giving customers the chance to ask questions and this was crucial to maintaining our operating partners’ engagement. Where we may have held game launch parties or tournament events in the past, we brought this online with virtual tournaments with prizes. This was a great success and saw a high number of


8 OCTOBER 2022 GIO


customers participate. We have taken these ways of working forward as face-to-face meetings have become the norm again, making for a stronger service overall while maintaining all the traditional trappings of great account management. Big operators generally have back-to-back meetings, so we work with the rule of ‘always have a purpose’. We never have a meeting for a meeting’s sake, and we’re always prepared. This is the best way to grow credibility with a client.


Nadine Thys: Personally, the pandemic led me to build much stronger relationships with my clients. As opposed to asking them what they needed from a business standpoint, I was asking them how they were doing and whether they were coping. The pandemic was incredibly diffi cult, and we were all in the same boat, so it was important that we looked out for each other and stuck together. Before we’d only really speak to people face-to-face two or three times a year at industry shows, but video calls meant that we were seeing and speaking to each other two or three times a week! Despite things returning to normal, we’ve not changed the way these relationships operate and everything feels a lot more human, which I think is great.


Alice Timson: Account managers are now competing for product exposure against an enormous number of game releases each month. Maintaining great relationships will always be a central aspect of account management and there had to be an added dimension of creativity to remind customers that we were thinking of them during the pandemic. However, the way that we use data and present it to operators is evolving.


There’s no travel barrier with BI and more importantly, numbers are absolute. When account management behaves as an extension to an operator’s own team, offering analysis around player segmentation, KPIs and niche game characteristics using well-presented data, we’re providing useful support to use our games as a tool, instead of asking for a favour.


Christine Parkhill: At the heart of it, account management has not changed. It’s about being there for a customer, providing support, building and maintaining relationships, identifying opportunities and fi nding ways to realise them. The industry still doesn’t make full use of all the data we have available – this is something we at Push have spent the past two years developing. We’ve built a great BI team who work very closely with our account managers and I think this enables us to ask better questions and identify opportunities, then really optimise what we do with our partners. Most of our core tasks can be done over calls, such as game demos, receiving feedback and catch-up calls, but the most challenging part is meeting new customers. Nothing beats meeting new people in person - there always seems to be something lost in translation over chats or calls. As the pandemic grew worse, on a basic level, we had more frequent calls with customers. So, what would usually have been done over lunch, or in someone’s offi ce, was done over a call. We’re lucky that so many businesses popped up to support industries like ours, our game launches turned into online events. For example, we sent out cocktail kits to our customers for the launch of Jammin’ Jars 2,


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