The Most Common Mistakes When Onboarding New Gaming Players

The initial interactions a new customer has with your business set the tone for the entire relationship; the likelihood of a customer sticking with you (and recommending you to others) increases with the level of emphasis you put on creating an excellent onboarding process.

That’s why it’s important to make sure your onboarding process is robust, efficient and compliant and your customers can begin using your products as quickly as possible, with minimal drop-offs. Here, we explore some of the most common mistakes operators make when onboarding new gaming customers.

Using manual reviews

Traditionally, when performing some form of identity verification or onboarding, businesses would require a person to carry out manual reviews of identification documents. These outdated processes can be time-consuming, frustrating and create a poor user experience for customers who may be likely to move to a competitor. 

Humans are also more prone to errors; too many false negatives mean that fraudsters are slipping through the cracks, too many false positives mean legitimate users and transactions are being flagged incorrectly, leading to undue friction and lost business. Fraud prevention solutions aren’t effective unless they can tell good users from bad and implement different processes for each.

Automated processes are quicker, more accurate and more efficient and a user can usually find out the verdict of their application in seconds.

A slow process

One of the main reasons for customer abandonment is the speed of the onboarding process. If your process takes days or even weeks to arrive at a decision as to whether a customer is being approved or disapproved, they’re very likely to go to a competitor where they can be up and running in minutes.

Gaming customers (or ‘players’) infamously have some of the lowest tolerance for cumbersome ID checks out there, and a poor onboarding experience can see up to 45% of players drop off. This is especially prevalent when operators are running promotions; if an operator is running a promotion for a big horse race, a new customer will want to be using their service before the race so they can make use of the promotion. If the onboarding process is taking too long to come to a decision, the customer will use a provider where they can bet on the race.

Businesses who simplify their processes achieve onboarding success; those who ask customers to manually key in numerous and complicated fields which require extensive amounts of information, are also likely to suffer from dropouts.

Neglecting compliance

There are a wide range of gambling regulations and regulators in play today; in the UK, operators need to comply with UKGC regulations.

LCCP in the UK requires identity and address verification upon account opening, additional KYC and EDD is based on operators’ risk-based approach. For many other markets 2+2 is required upon certain thresholds or withdrawal.

Neglecting regulatory compliance can come at a considerable consequence; some companies have been put out of business by enormous non-compliance fines and some big brands have suffered huge reputational damage. But, completing manual identity proofing measures in order to remain compliant can lead to long and cumbersome account opening processes that drive away new users. The challenge going forward is to meet regulatory requirements without adding friction and delays, which lead to customer frustration and drop-offs.

Using traditional forms of data

Using ‘traditional’ forms of identity such as using credit history mean that many good customers are turned away. A vast number of millennials do not have CRA data so if this source is used, they are rejected. Equally so in countries where customers have thin files and traditional data does not exist or is scarce.

Relying on these ‘traditional’ forms of identity doesn’t just alienate the modern digital player, it can also lead to huge demographics being unable to access the services they want. 

How we can help

To avoid the most common mistakes when onboarding new gaming customers, you need a partner and tool which is robust, efficient and compliant.

Introducing Sodium, our global ID, KYC & AML platform. Sodium is designed to help save you time and money, streamline your customer journey, automate your onboarding process, reduce fraud and achieve regulatory compliance by delivering a complete suite of Identity Verification and Fraud Prevention solutions via a single API. This solution enables all data sources to be cross-referenced and deliver truly enhanced customer due diligence.

A unique and real-time ID scoring system intelligently verifies identity through a combination of data sources, including digital footprint verification, document authentication, facial recognition matching, liveness verification, live utility data address verification and CRA identity checks.

Utilise a single element or multiple processes – it’s entirely up to you. Learn more about how we can help to automate and simplify your verification processes to help you to learn more about your customers.

Book a demo today and see for yourself how powerful our suite of solutions are.