Cameron Conn, Founder and CEO of compliance and licensing management platform OneComply, delves into gaming company culture and asks if enough is being done to make it sufficiently customer-focused…
Gaming and sports betting operators spend billions of dollars and massive resources to ensure they are providing an exemplary experience for their customers. From initial client acquisition to ongoing promotions, operators go to great lengths to understand and manage their customers in order to provide programs and incentives that keep them coming back to their site, whether it’s online or bricks and mortar.
For gaming companies, building and fostering a customer-focused culture is part of their DNA. It’s written into their mission statements, it’s part of their employee onboarding for virtually every department, and it’s something they invest heavily in, whether it’s for training or for deploying state-of-the-art, purpose-built tools. Building and maintaining a customer-focused culture is intrinsic to the success of their business.
Where does compliance fit into your culture?
In the US, the gaming and sports betting industry is among the most highly regulated industries in the world. Securing a license is mandatory for a gaming company, because without it they literally have no business. And complying with all the regulations, in order to maintain and protect that license, is critical.
But would most gaming companies say they have built a compliance culture in their organization? Even though it’s absolutely essential to operating in the gaming industry, licensing and operational compliance just doesn’t get the attention it deserves.
Building a compliance culture
It’s time for gaming companies to put the same importance and resources into regulatory and operational compliance as they acquire and manage their customers. Customer focus is great, but it’s all-for-not without a compliance culture to protect a gaming company’s most important asset – their gaming license.
But how do you create a compliance culture, since licensing and compliance has for decades been highly siloed, with responsibilities spread amongst various unconnected departments, including legal, compliance, HR, operations and finance?
And imagine running your customer acquisition or player development program with the same outdated spreadsheets, Word documents, emails and file-sharing sites that your licensing and compliance teams are using?
New tools to bring compliance into the 21st century
Just as specialized software platforms are to drive their customer acquisition and management programs and bring together all the disparate departments of the organization, purpose-built SaaS platforms specifically designed for gaming are now available to manage, automate and centralize a company’s licensing and operational compliance processes.
Tools like OneComply’s licensing and compliance management platform enables all stakeholders in a company’s compliance ecosystem to utilize a solution specifically designed for gaming that ties together all these disparate parts and breaks down the silos that can put a license in jeopardy.
And like the tools for customer acquisition and management, OneComply provides high level dashboards that provide an “at a glance” overview of all license and compliance issues requiring attention as well as providing visibility to stakeholders on all aspects of licensing and operational compliance impacting their organization. It’s designed to be the place where legal, compliance, HR and a gaming company’s executive team can log into every day to check on the health of their most important business asset – their gaming license.
How to start your compliance culture
So the question is always, how does a gaming company create a compliance culture? The answer is quite simple: just use the same strategies, processes, and management directives that you used to create your customer culture. The techniques you used to drive a customer culture can be easily transferred to creating your compliance culture, with the key driver being the commitment and support from the C-suite to make it happen.
And most of all, it’s imperative to arm your compliance stakeholders with the same level of advanced, purpose-built technology that you’re using for your customer management processes. One that all key stakeholders can access and rally around, that provides structure and visibility into the entire licensing and compliance process, and that can be the control center to ensure that nothing falls through the cracks.
Having a single bad customer experience isn’t great, but it won’t take down a company. However, having a single major compliance failure can put your gaming license and business in jeopardy.
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Cameron Conn – Founder & CEO – OneComply
