“We ran a survey last year asking how our customers want to get help from us. The amount of people saying they want to self-serve or get answers without talking to somebody was quite surprising. In response, we’re now focusing on experimenting with AI and improving our non-agent help.”
Matthew Litherland
Senior Service Delivery Manager at Bally's
“We’ve got loyal customers who have been visiting our sites daily for 9 or 10 years. You've got to look after those people. In a crowded marketplace offering largely the same games and tools, one thing that can differentiate you is customer service.”
Matthew Litherland
Senior Service Delivery Manager at Bally's
Zendesk customer since
2019
Call handling time
From avg. 918 seconds down to 699 seconds
Daily Unique Contact Ratio
88%
9%
Email Deflections
16.4%
FAQ views as a % of monthly active users (going up)
6%
Contacts as a % of monthly active users (coming down)
Bally's Interactive's journey in customer support excellence
Bally's Interactive is the digital arm of leading entertainment provider Bally’s Corporation and runs websites offering sports betting, iGaming and free-to-play. It has tens of millions of players around the world, across brands including Jackpotjoy, Bally Bet, Vera&John, and Virgin Casino. Bally’s Interactive has been a Zendesk customer since 2019 when it first trialled the platform with one of its sites. Following great results, it spent the next couple of years migrating all its sites over. Its Customer Service and Customer Due Diligence support teams sit across the UK and Spain, and employ 140 service agents.
An omnichannel approach to service
Bally’s Interactive has been evolving its customer contact channels in line with shifting customer preferences, as well as to take advantage of emerging AI technology. Around 90% of its Customer Service traffic currently flows to its messaging service and 10% to email. The company is looking to explore social integrations in 2025 for the likes of Facebook and X.
For the Customer Due Diligence team, where conversations around affordability and spend on site can be more complex, the split of incoming contact is 65% calls and 35% messaging. On top of this, the company delivers alerts via API and email which are more than all of the other interactions combined at around 10,000 per month.
For Know Your Customer, a critical aspect of customer interaction related to regulatory compliance, Bally’s Interactive uses messaging and email only. Emails make up 70% of incoming contacts, while messaging makes up the other 30%.
Bally’s Interactive moved its messaging system over to Zendesk’s asynchronous messaging service in July. In just three months, it has seen a reduction in monthly users contacting support from around 8% to 5.8% - a drop of 12-15,000 contacts per month.
“With our old session based live chat, we had a lot of people repeatedly contact us about the same issue because of problems with disconnecting and having to come back through, and then talking to someone else. Zendesk Messaging has helped us to significantly reduce that,” explains Matthew Litherland, Senior Service Delivery Manager at Bally’s Interactive.
Leveraging AI in line with customer feedback
The team has also been turning its attention to the best ways of incorporating AI into the service mix and improving its non-agent support options, including the creation of a bot using Zendesk AI.
“We don’t ever want to be in a position where customers can't find how to call or chat with us if they need to,” says Matthew. “If somebody says: ‘I really want to talk to someone’, we'll always phone them straight back. But we ran a survey last year asking how our customers want to get help from us and the number of people saying they want to self-serve or get answers without talking to somebody was quite surprising.”
In fact, Bally’s self service is currently out-performing contacts. It receives three views on its FAQs page to every one contact – the highest it's ever been. “We're now looking at placing more helpful information across our sites,” says Matthew. “We think this traffic will also naturally start flowing to our bot as it becomes more intelligent.
Although the bot is still quite basic in the UK, it's more sophisticated in Spain, albeit to a smaller customer base. “When the systems become more closely linked over the next couple of months, we’ll really be able to leverage the AI to understand what a question is about before it even reaches an agent,” explains Matthew.
The company is beginning to use AI for other small optimisations too. For example, 30% of conversations are now automatically categorised based on the intelligent triage feature, which shaves a significant amount off our contact handling times. “Auto categorisation has had a huge impact on handling time,” says Matthew. “Our average customer service handling time for messaging conversations over the last five months has been 918 seconds, while auto-categorised tickets have averaged 699 seconds, which is a huge saving.”
The company expects to increase the use of auto categorisation as the system learns the intents more.
Meanwhile, on the agent side, it is seeing improvements in writing, thanks to AI-enabled generative summaries and automatic noting of accounts. The company’s top user over the last four months has increased their quality score from 52% to 89% by using enhanced writing features on nearly every contact. Additionally, autoreply has been impactful in Spain, with 10% of emails being resolved using the feature. With emails making up 50% of Spain’s incoming contacts, this is a significant benefit.
In a crowded market, service is a key differentiator
Providing a good customer experience is central to Bally’s offering and the company sees it as a key point of difference from its competitors. “We’ve got loyal customers, some of whom have been visiting our sites daily for 9 or 10 years,” explains Matthew. “You've got to look after those people. In a crowded marketplace, one thing that can differentiate you is customer service. How you help customers when they have a problem or eliminate the problem entirely is one thing that can set you apart from companies out there offering the same games and tools.”
With the aim of delivering world class customer service at the heart of their strategy, Bally’s Interactive is looking at making further investments, both to enhance the experience it can offer customers and to evolve in line with regulation. “With an increased focus on protecting our players, we need to make sure we can talk to them at the right time” explains Matthew. “That means having the tools in place that allow us to have those conversations quickly and easily.”
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