Infor Helps CryptoLogic Play the Game
CRM In Action: Infor and CryptoLogic
Focused on integrity and innovation, CryptoLogic Inc. is a world-leading developer and supplier of Internet gaming software. CryptoLogic’s leadership in regulatory compliance makes it one of the few companies with gaming software that is certified to strict standards similar to land-based gaming.
As a provider of one of the most extensive Internet gaming solutions, CryptoLogic-developed software powers one of the largest poker rooms on the Internet and offers more than 260 online casino games and multiplayer bingo games, all in multiple languages and currencies. The company also offers back-office, player, and marketing support services to its customers.
As an international leader in online gaming, CryptoLogic operates in one of the most regulated industries. The company must provide solutions and services that both support its customers’ business growth objectives and meet the wide range of stringent government regulations that exist in most countries.
The business results of CryptoLogic are closely intertwined with the business results of its licensees. “Much of our revenue is based on the volume of online gaming activity that our licensees can achieve,” explains Patrick Siconolfi, manager, CRM Solutions, CryptoLogic. “Because of this, we have even more of a vested interest in seeing that our licensees succeed than most companies.”
In working with its licensees to optimize their marketing programs, CryptoLogic found many areas for improvement. “We found that their marketing dollars weren’t being spent as effectively as possible,” he says. “Many of our licensees were giving promotions to players who didn’t represent the most value to them.”
To correct this situation, CryptoLogic knew that it needed to implement an advanced customer relationship management solution that would help better segment players and do it in an a way that was efficient. The new solution also would need to provide analytics and reporting capabilities so CryptoLogic’s licensees could understand the results from marketing initiatives and continually improve their campaigns.
Getting Business Specific
CryptoLogic chose to implement Infor™ CRM Epiphany® Outbound Marketing to enhance its marketing product suite. “We purchased the Infor solution primarily to make our licensees’ marketing dollars go further and, ultimately, to make them more successful,” Siconolfi explains. “Of all the solutions available, Outbound Marketing clearly offered the best combination of advanced outbound marketing functionality, scalability, and ease of use.”
Infor’s Outbound Marketing is an integrated, user-friendly database marketing solution that streamlines the often complex campaign process and helps companies develop highly sophisticated targeting schemes. As the system captures campaign responses, closed-loop analytics help marketers learn from each campaign and continually improve the process.
The successful implementation of Outbound Marketing at CryptoLogic followed a period of extensive analysis and preparation. “We undertook a data quality initiative to make sure that the data to be used with the Infor solution would be clean and would enable our licensees to work from a single view of the customer,” Siconolfi says, adding that one of the primary challenges its licensees faced was an incomplete and unclear picture of their players.
In implementing Infor’s Outbound Marketing, CryptoLogic adhered to a disciplined process that included several steps in which its licensees were given an opportunity to respond to mockups of the solution and provide immediate feedback.
Seeing Results
According to Siconolfi, the implementation of the Infor CRM solution produced measurable business benefits almost immediately after being implemented. “We’ve seen a four to five percent gain in our licensees’ revenue that can be directly attributed to the improvements in marketing enabled by Infor’s Outbound Marketing,” he says. “This means the solution is creating a meaningful bottom-line benefit to our company each month.”
The financial benefit enabled by Outbound Marketing can be traced back to the industry-leading functionality and ease of use. “The biggest differentiator is the way the solution abstracts data structures,” Siconolfi says. “Our licensees have the data presented to them in the exact format they need to do their jobs. This is a clear advantage over other solutions that require the time and expense of an IT staff member to rework the data so it can be understood and acted on by marketers.”
The solution also gives marketers significantly greater segmentation capabilities such as the level of activity and size of the bets. “We’ve seen a five to seven percent increase in our licensees’ acquisition of new players as a result of more targeted acquisition campaigns. With Outbound Marketing, our licensees can create campaigns with upwards of 150 segments, compared with only 3 for any given campaign before the solution was implemented,” Siconolfi says, adding that CryptoLogic’s licensees have been able to reduce the number of man-hours spent each day on customer segmentation activities from 70 to 2.
In addition to empowering marketers to create and implement higher impact campaigns, the Outbound Marketing solution from Infor is also benefiting C-level executives who now have faster access to business performance information. “Before we implemented
Outbound Marketing, licensees couldn’t measure success on the campaign level. They now know what campaigns are producing the most success, so they can concentrate their efforts on the activities that produce the best return.”
According to Phil Chen, director decision support systems at CryptoLogic, “The deployment of Outbound Marketing further strengthens our vision for providing world-class information services to our licensees. The system complements our existing business intelligence offering, enabling our licensees to turn their analytical insight into actionable marketing programs.”
Being Open to an Enterprising Future
For CryptoLogic, the next major enhancement to its marketing product suite will be in implementing more realtime capabilities. “With the current implementation of Infor CRM Epiphany Outbound Marketing, we have succeeded in providing marketing capabilities that leverage a single view of the customer,” Siconolfi says. “In the next phase, we will take that a step further and give online gaming companies the tools they need to market to their players in real-time when they are in the casino or depositing or withdrawing money. This will make it possible to execute campaigns when customers are most interested in hearing the marketing message.”
“The stuff we’re doing in the marketing space is pretty exciting,” Siconolfi says. “The implementation of Infor’s Outbound Marketing has set the stage for taking overall marketing activities, both inbound and outbound, to a new level.”
[Photo courtesy of cnbc.]
