Offering your Customers a Better Choosing Experience
Lottery operators are well familiar with the challenges of finding quality games and products to offer the public while competing with illegal and unregulated operators. However, providing the right combination of products takes expert understanding of the market. INTRALOT’s strategy: working directly with lotteries to design the right games for their customers, while minimizing the complexity of choice for the operators.
By Christina Boubalou, Group Marketing Director at INTRALOT

Offering your customers a better choosing experience
Asking someone to make a choice that favors you is not an easy thing. We make decisions every day, either as individuals or enterprises, and the decision-making process is – in principle – the same. The collaterals though are the ones making a true difference. And in the era of the “give-the-customer-whatever-they-want” moto, we tend to give our consumers many options in an attempt to win them over. Who would have known that so many shades of blue jeans or ice cream flavors exist?

In our industry, it is quite often for lottery operators to struggle in competing with il-legal gaming as they have to antagonize with unregulated prizes and payouts and this is something extremely hard to overcome. But we can thrive in a different thing: we can of-fer our customers a better choosing – thus shopping – experience.

Psychology of choice does not rely on price/prize alone, so it is always a good idea to run a retrospective evaluation on your product portfolio and verify that it is indeed opti-mum.

Do your games have a clear value proposition?
Designing a lottery games portfolio can be quite a handful. Most of us are deep diving into the game types, prize structures, draws frequencies, looking for ways to attract more players and increase our revenues. Still, players tend to surprise us. During the pandemic, while we were all looking for touchless solutions – because it felt right to provide the answer to a different problem (contamination) – the product that sells rocket-high numbers was the only one that you could not avoid touching: Scratch Cards!

In order for a new game to rightfully occupy its place in the portfolio, we need to evaluate all the games and not just the new one. In INTRALOT, we use a specific framework to evaluate portfolio against local cultures, demographics, recent social and financial projections, and most importantly, players’ emotions. "We grant our game proposals with a clear, distinctive, and unique value proposition that addresses a specific audience and satisfies a superset of needs. This is how we make the games a clear choice for the player".

Remember that innovators are not consumers
Sometimes, within our R&D departments, diamonds pop! But just because we are familiar with a hard Keno twist or an add-on, it does not mean that the majority of the public is ready to embrace it. With research and market insights on our side, we – at INTRALOT – accompany our forecasts and projections of a new game launch with an anticipated “adoption curve” that is strictly related to how experienced the majority of the audience we are targeting is. This way, we have a clear view of who will eventually choose this innovative feature and we are in a position to evaluate its feasibility against time.

Less is more
In his book Future Shock (1971), Alvin Toffler says “Overchoice takes place when the advantages of diversity and individualization are canceled by the complexity of a buyer’s decision-making process”. Try to identify in your portfolio your true best-sellers, the ones that the Pareto principle is talking about. 80% of your sales should come from 20% of your products. What about the rest of them? Are they there because we do not want to lose our “shelf space”? In INTRALOT’s lottery solution, we offer several ad-hoc and reporting functions that will help you historically identify the best game choices of your players.

Reduce complexity in choices
One of the hardest things to accomplish is the motivation of our retailers. When it comes to consumers’ choices, they are the interface of our products and our key weapon in reducing choice complexity.

Imagine that you want to buy curtains and you only have a thick catalogue with pieces of fabric that is not answering any of your questions! On the other hand, an employee will make you confront one decision at a time, eliminating your options with every decision made and making you feel the progress towards the right direction.

Although lottery buyers are definitely creatures of habit, we keep complaining how no new players are choosing our games, how the pie is not growing. INTRALOT’s Re tail-er Management Software offers a complete loyalty scheme with Retailer Incentivization possibilities and information so that eventually, people working for the lotteries will start being the true service around the product and our most valuable revenue generator.