It’s both an exciting and lucrative time for the iGaming market — defined as online betting on sports, casino table games, slot machines, poker, and eSports — and ripe with new opportunities. After the US Supreme Court’s 2018 ruling to lift the federal ban on sports betting, which left laws within the hands of each individual state, New Jersey, Delaware, Mississippi, West Virginia, and New Mexico were among the first to open their doors to online gambling. Internationally, iGaming is now legal in most countries, with a few exceptions such as Lebanon, Singapore, and Japan.
The availability of legal online sports betting is currently colliding with the 2022 World Cup, just underway in Qatar, whose country boasts one of the most stringent gambling restrictions across the globe. Industry experts expect the FIFA World Cup Qatar 2022 to draw more bets than the 2018 World Cup, which is widely considered to be the most bet-on sports event in history.
Not surprisingly, iGaming market investment is expected to grow significantly. According to Zion Market Research, the online betting market was worth $61.5B last year and will reach $114.4B by 2028.
To deliver on player expectations and fend off increasing global competition, online gambling brands worldwide need to make translation and Localisation for target markets a priority investment to support all areas across the customer journey.
So, how can iGaming brands harness the power of machine translation to deliver better customer support, make marketing content more accessible, and prepare for demand surges when support is needed the most?
iGaming customer support that scales
It’s hard to overstate how vital customer support is in the world of iGaming. After all, when you have gamblers depositing real money to place bets and play online casino games, they will inevitably need to reach out by chat, SMS, email, or phone to cash in their wins, get their questions answered or concerns allayed.
As such, iGaming sites require support agents with expertise in online gambling policies. But in an ever-expanding global industry, customer support must be available in many languages to support all audience locales. The traditional approach would be to hire agents based on the languages they speak, but you’ll end up hiring some agents for their language skills and not their iGaming support talent.
And what happens when multilingual agents leave? The remaining support team will struggle to cover all the necessary languages, creating support bottlenecks.
A top-notch iGaming customer support team must have the capacity to function regardless of language barriers. The use of machine translation (MT) tools — enhanced by human review when necessary — can alleviate the pressure to rely solely on human translators and help companies expand quickly into new markets.
But more on that later…
Localize for a consistent iGaming customer journey
Customer support is the foundation of a successful iGaming customer experience, but the customer journey also includes website and in-app content, SEO, social media, help articles, FAQs, and the payment process (currencies).
Localizing content is no easy task — especially translating SEO keywords across different languages — but iGaming companies that properly localize all their marketing content will boost brand visibility and customer retention, giving new players a reason to come back to their user-friendly site. According to our 2021 Global Multilingual CX Report, 73% of the consumers we surveyed are more loyal to multilingual brands.
On top of that, localization has become essential to company profitability. In Unbabel’s recent Global Trends in Marketing Localization 2023 report, 84% of respondents noted that localizing content has had a positive impact on revenue growth.
Dealing with iGaming market demand peaks
The iGaming market is rife with demand spikes. There are online sportsbook betting surges around the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the Rugby World Cup, and the mars Madness tournament, to name a few popular events. For online casino games, players tend to gamble online more during the holidays and winter months because they’re not working as much and are confined indoors. On a daily basis, the peak playing time for most online casinos is 8pm – 2 am.
The challenge for iGaming customer support teams is anticipating demand surges and being properly staffed to support multiple languages in the run-up to a surge. But scaling your support teams up and down to accommodate demand spikes is not practical, because it’s too difficult to find agents who both speak your target languages and have iGaming support expertise. Machine translation tools can unburden iGaming customer support teams from hiring quagmires.
Rather than hire three different people to support three different languages, MT tools can effectively give one agent multilingual superpowers to accommodate multiple languages at once, all while maintaining the high-quality user experience online players expect.
With MT tools, agents will be able to reply in the local language via chats and emails. Equipped with this capability, iGaming operators can make sure that each channel is properly staffed for the next surge.
Stack the odds in your favor with Unbabel
Unbabel’s iGaming customers have been able to stay ahead of online gambling surges and expand into new global markets.
Hero Gaming is a classic case: This fast-growing iGaming company saw a huge jump in popularity recently that increased its need for world-class multilingual customer support. Hiring more support agents in all its markets would’ve been a budget buster. It’s safe to say that Hero Gaming hit the jackpot in its partnership with Unbabel.
The company was able to launch into three new markets in six months using Unbabel’s AI-driven, human-refined, translations platform along with Hero Gaming’s existing support teams in Malta and India. The result? Response times were cut by 92% and average CSAT scores notched 90% — all without hiring additional agents!
As the iGaming market expands across the world, Unbabel’s LangOps approach that combines advanced AI and human review will help iGaming brands beat the odds with real-time, high-quality translations and localization.
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