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Changing the way the igaming industry treats CRM

| By Josephine Watson | Reading Time: 3 minutes
Historically, tech development within operators is a huge undertaking. Simon Lidzén comments on the journey to creating CRM tools that alleviate this challenge.
With competition on the rise year-by-year, maintaining an effective customer relationship (CRM) strategy and thus protecting revenues are priorities for many operators. If your speciality isn’t in tech, however, this can be a huge undertaking, says Simon Lidzén, CEO and co-founder of FAST TRACK, who has seen first-hand the difficulties facing the industry today. FAST TRACK began operating in February 2016 as a gaming technology and service provider that specialises in providing ready-for-operation casino sites. Now, as they prepare to launch their new CRM system, Lidzén reflects on the decisions which led to the upcoming launch.

Identifying market challenges

As part of its business model, FAST TRACK forms growth partnerships with the aim of keeping close to both the brand and the customer. Lidzén explains: “That means we can experience the problems that the operators have. This has been the main field for R&D in our company.” As a result of this, while working with some of their earliest partners and delivering operational services, they identified some key difficulties: “When doing that exercise, we realised how ridiculous the operational workflow was. There’s so much legacy in the industry but no tools to support the ways of working.” He says the manual, ad hoc processes led to a lack of efficiency and poor customer experiences, too: “When you’re trying to run a campaign these days, you have to upload one campaign in one language on one system, then you have to go to find the report to find the customers, then upload that on to several different tools. It took a massive amount of effort in order to get anything done.”

Developing a system that works

After seeing this, FAST TRACK set out to develop their own internal systems to solve these challenges. Lidzén says: “In order to get where we wanted to be, we needed to create a tool that was able to work in real-time while our customers are actually on the site – most of the tools didn’t have support for this as they loaded the data once a day. Then, we needed to find a way to work in a different way, because otherwise, you’d need to hire an army of people just to make the system work. We had to have one system that was coordinating all of the other systems, like a single brain in the middle. “Thirdly, we needed to make the working environment more efficient. We started to identify all bottlenecks and time-consuming tasks, and then we designed the system to deal with this in as few clicks as possible. Even if you have the tools to do it, it needs to be possible for a junior member of the team to go in and set up these campaigns without any struggle. It needs to lend itself to the igaming workflow.” By building the tool with the igaming work processes as the sole focus, Lidzén feels it solves real problems in the day-to-day operations. FAST TRACK will make an official launch at ICE 2019, and looks forward to demonstrating the product publicly for the first time. Simon Lidzén co-founded FAST TRACK in early 2016 with a focus to simplify the online casino business. Simon has over 13 years in the igaming industry, heading up various tech and product teams at companies such as Betsson group and Betfair. Simon has a focus on innovation, product strategy and to achieve organisational efficiency.

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