Personalization à la SmartLobbies: Each player is unique, why isn’t your casino lobby?

Personalization is a powerful force that propels today’s competition between online casinos.

The concept is nothing new, however, the playing field has changed. Simple personalization that entails manually refreshing a casino lobby from time to time just doesn’t cut it anymore.

After all, in the so-called “attention economy” online casinos are no longer just competing with each other – but with any other brand outside of the iGaming industry that can engage players with more exciting content and a better, personalized customer experience.

One startup platform and white label provider, The Mill Adventure (TMA), stepped up to help online casinos tip the scales in their favour, with a first-of-its-kind, SmartLobbies.

Insight: complexities of casino lobby management

The value of a compelling, personalized lobby cannot be dismissed and while offering a “personalized experience” is simple in theory, integrating this strategy into online casinos’ core operations has been limited by the manual effort required.

Moreover, at a time when player attention is scarce, it is imperative to not just deliver content and messaging that is customized, but one that delivers, real-time value based on players’ dynamic circumstances such as behaviour and gaming patterns.

These are the key issues that TMA has recognized with regards to the industry status quo on online casino lobbies.

Seeing an opportunity in leveraging the wave of technological breakthroughs, such as machine learning, the same one that has defined the most successful audio and video streaming giants in the entertainment and media industry, TMA reimagined the same strategy and transposed it into SmartLobbies.

Solution: Personalization and automation powered by artificial intelligence

Gone are the days when operators need to manually decide which content to show and create segments to tailor their casino lobbies into meeting the expectations of groups of players. SmartLobbies curates a real-time collection of personalized content, relevant for each player profile – all while automating and optimizing the casino management task for operators. In a nutshell, one lobby is transformed into multiple variants meant to satisfy every unique customer’s gaming desires and needs.

Insight-based recommendations

Content that fails to resonate with players is a missed opportunity – and with a constantly growing number of games being launched almost daily, the key is how to leverage this rich amount of data in a way that makes each game more valuable to the players.

One of the key features of SmartLobbies is games recommendation – solving the issue of players having to scour through a virtually limitless number of contents taking away from time that could be used enjoying the games themselves.

To achieve this, data such as information on the user, game metadata, and past interactions between users and games are combined, then used to train artificial neural networks, whose job is to find relations between the provided datasets. This solves questions such as which content to best recommend to the user.

Real-time data and statistics

SmartLobbies goes beyond just player demographics and their gaming habits and preferences, it also takes into account dynamic data attributes that can change within the blink of an eye.

As a part of the solution, SmartLobbies employs smart metrics which collects and processes games activity data in real-time, yielding various metrics that are then used to provide rankings and statistics, such as based on popularity and trends.

The metrics are contextualized according to the online casino brand, the country, or the user, among other factors. Given the traction gained by such rankings in media and entertainment platforms, TMA believes showcasing categories such as trending or top games within can capture players’ curiosity towards knowing what other players in their market are currently playing and encourage them to discover the fuss behind the hottest content.

Challenge: Combining multiple complex features into a single, user-friendly tool

Creating a solution that can successfully combine all crucial personalization and automation features into a single, user-friendly solution – from scratch – is not without its challenges.

Lukasz Dziedzia, Senior Software Engineer at the Mill Adventure, elaborates on the complexities they have had to overcome, “Building a robust real-time data aggregation for ‘Smart Metrics’ and implementing a solution for games recommendations driven by AI/ML algorithms were definitely the most technically advanced parts of the SmartLobbies project.

“But something we are most proud of is that we managed to hide all that complexity behind a very friendly and simple user interface, which allows our partners to configure lobbies with just a few clicks.”

Looking ahead: the future of SmartLobbies

TMA has already seen the impact on customer loyalty and retention for its current partners that have employed SmartLobbies in their operations. That said, it only scratches the surface of their mission to create seamless and personalized experiences for players while helping operators and white-labels alike to automate and optimize operations.

Slowly building their reputation on challenging the efficiency of current tools and practices in the iGaming industry and successfully changing the status quo with better solutions, The Mill Adventure will continue to push the boundaries when it comes to helping online casinos stay relevant to their players and keeping players engaged