What can sports betting teach other digital businesses about customer experience?
A few years ago, ordering something online and receiving a confirmation email was enough to satisfy most customers. Today, people want to know where their order is, when it will arrive and why the delivery date has changed. They expect the same level of detail from banking apps, travel websites and almost every other digital service they use. Companies have spent years encouraging customers to do more online, and those customers have become rather particular about how things should work.
Sports betting is an interesting industry to examine in this respect. The platforms handle payments, changing information and large numbers of visitors, sometimes all within a few minutes of a major football match starting. There are useful lessons here for businesses that have nothing to do with sport.
Make the important information easy to find
Some online retailers make shopping unnecessarily complicated. You can spend ten minutes comparing products, add something to your basket and discover that the delivery cost only appears at the last stage. Others hide the return policy in a section that nobody would think to open.
Sports betting websites have less room for this kind of inconvenience. Someone checking Saturday's football fixtures wants to see the matches, the available markets and the latest prices without having to search through several unrelated pages.
On Betway, the connection between football information and sports betting is central to the service, with fixtures and markets organised around the events customers are interested in. The platform also offers live betting, a wide selection of sports markets and mobile access, allowing customers to follow matches and place bets wherever they are.
A travel booking website could learn something from that arrangement. Show people the flight times, baggage allowance and total price before trying to sell them another service. It's a fairly ordinary idea, but plenty of companies still get it wrong.
Customers want to know where things stand
Banking apps are a good example of how frustrating poor communication can be. You make a payment, but instead of getting a confirmation, the screen stays exactly as it was. You're left checking your balance or transaction history to work out whether the money has actually gone through. Even a short delay can become annoying when the app gives no indication of what's happening.
Betting platforms like Betway deal with information that can change during a football match, so keeping account activity and event details current is an important part of their operation. Other businesses could be better at explaining what their systems are doing.
A delivery company doesn't necessarily need to provide a moving map of every package. Even a useful update explaining that an order has reached the local depot is better than displaying the same vague message for three days.
A mobile website should feel like it belongs on a phone
Plenty of businesses claim to be mobile-friendly because their websites technically fit smaller screens. That doesn't mean they are pleasant to use.
Try filling out a long insurance form on a phone while switching between messages to find your policy number. Or changing a hotel reservation when the calendar keeps disappearing behind the keyboard. These are everyday tasks, yet some websites still seem designed around the assumption that everybody is sitting at a desk.
Mobile entertainment businesses have spent considerable effort making important functions accessible without requiring endless scrolling. The useful lesson isn't that every company needs an elaborate app. Sometimes improving the mobile website, reducing unnecessary form fields and making buttons easier to select would accomplish far more.
Why familiar features matter to customers
There is another habit worth questioning. Technology companies love redesigns, particularly when they can announce a completely new experience. Customers aren't always as enthusiastic.
Take a banking app you've been using for years: you know exactly where to go to make a transfer, until an update moves everything around and you're left looking through menus for something that used to take a few seconds. Shopping websites do much the same thing, replacing perfectly clear categories with new icons and layouts. The people behind these changes may see them as improvements, but regular customers aren't always convinced.
Sports betting operators have to consider how familiar layouts affect regular visitors. Moving frequently used features around simply to make an interface look newer can make the service harder to navigate.
The same applies to almost any digital business. Improvements should make familiar tasks easier, not force customers to learn them again.
Customer service is part of the product
One of the biggest frustrations with online businesses has little to do with their websites. It's what happens when something needs attention.
Customer service would be a lot easier if support teams had a clearer picture of what customers had been doing before getting in touch. Someone calling about a late delivery shouldn't have to explain when they placed the order or what the last tracking update said. None of this is particularly revolutionary. It requires companies to think about what happens after somebody clicks the purchase button.
And that is probably the most useful lesson from sports betting and other fast-moving digital services. Customers rarely appreciate the amount of technology operating behind a website. They notice whether it works, whether the information makes sense and whether they can get something done without having to contact support.
A company that handles those ordinary things well has already done more for its customer experience than one that introduces a dozen impressive features nobody particularly needed.
