Get to know your customer and raise sales

People bet anonymously. Therefore, it’s hard to communicate with them. What to do about it?

Majority of Sazka’s customers bet using their terminals. Most of these bettors stay anonymous. That makes it difficult for Sazka to effectively communicate with its own customers and to raise its turnover. To change that they created Sazka Loyalty Club. Even though hundreds of players set up an account and got their card, there certainly was room for improvement in terms of its actual usage. People did not feel the need to take it out of their wallet and often did not even have it with them. The goal of the project and Direct People’s task was to find a way to motivate people to use their card more often – we aimed at 40 % of transactions to be traceable to a concrete customer. And to potentially also grow bet volumes.

Collecting experience, understanding problems

How did we approach it? We call it discovery and it’s essentially a field work. We meet the real service users and conduct detailed interviews (so called empathies) with them. We set out to newsstands to talk to sellers and customers around the Czech republic to collect their stories. Our goal was to get insights about the loyalty club and betting itself. The interviews revealed that long series of losses are demotivating. One of the ideas we had was to immediately offer an additional game to bettors. We decided to move this concept forward.

Kolo štěstí – mission accomplished

We designed a prototype and a process to verify if it is successful or not. In two months we built a fully functional web app and we called it Kolo štěstí (Wheel of Fortune). We tested it at 8 selling points where it got spinned more than 10 000 times. 

The only condition to play Kolo štěstí was to use your Sazka Loyalty Club card when purchasing Sazka’s products. And the result? The concept turned out to be very attractive even for occasional players. Prototyping resulted in 200% increase of identified payments as well as increase in overall sales at all test sites. We exceeded the set target by far.

And what was next?

At the beginning of 2020, Sazka developed a final proposition of Kolo štěstí. It was 90 % identical with the original prototype. However, it was necessary to retest it before launching it throughout the country. The “technical pilot” verified all functionalities and end-to-end customer processes over the course of one month. Then came the crucial “business pilot”. Kolo štěstí was launched into full operation in the East Bohemian region which makes up around a tenth of Sazka’s retail network. Over the course of 5 weeks, they were evaluating changes in customers’ behavior compared to the rest of the country. Both tests yielded excellent results. After some final touch up, Kolo štěstí was launched in July 2020.

The number of customers using the loyalty card and identified turnover both jumped up. Moreover, Kolo štěstí, which was primarily created for lottery customers, scored exceptionally well with customers buying scratchcards. It met Sazka’s expectations to the dot. It brought about a significant increase in incremental sales, better customer journey and happier customers (thanks to Kolo štěstí, betting became more attractive to 60 % of customers) and greater “gamification” of this traditionally transactional business.

Sazka is continuously improving Kolo štěstí. After success in retail they decided to offer similar experience to online bettors at Sazka.cz. We helped with the proposition again, but that’s a different story.

„We wanted to understand the behaviour and wishes of our customers and attend to their real needs. We were looking for a way to build a product that will truly be to their taste. Our cooperation with Direct People showed us that such solutions can be found. Moreover our people are different after working on Kolo štěstí project. We are no longer inventing what the customer wants in the meeting room but we are asking them directly.”

Aleš Veselý
Chief Marketing Officer SAZKA

See what David Schenk, Head of CRM at Sazka, has to say about our cooperation. The video is in Czech.