The Belgian National Lottery is a unique player in the (online) gambling market. Their status as a socially and ethically driven organisation in a market full of highly profit-driven players is just one striking aspect. The question is, how can you compete whilst remaining true to your social responsibilities and ethical principles? At the CIONET round table discussion in June, Piet Van Petegem, CTIO at the Belgian National Lottery, elaborated on the role of the organisation's new cross-channel strategy and platform as a strategic asset.
Technical challenges
The building and finetuning of this new portal took around three years of work for about 100 FTE (about half of them external). This was a long journey, but the amount of technical and other challenges to overcome was quite considerable. Combining the front-end and the back-end, integrating the user experience on computer, mobile phone and the retail environment into one single environment with one unique account per player was certainly not what one would call an average project. “Especially when you know what’s at stake”, agrees Van Petegem. “You have to ensure that players are enrolled in the right draw, regardless of where and how they play, whether on their mobile, at home, in their shop, etc. If you don’t get it right, and a player loses out on a big win, this could cause real drama.” Being a highly visible player also brings many security risks which had to be considered as well. “Our databases are continuously being targeted, so we needed to pay extra attention to security as well.”
The complexity of integrating various environments required a solid and user-friendly software platform. Using Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), they were able to merge the various CMS systems. Adobe software proved the right solution for other parts of the project as well. Adobe Analytics serves to improve the content based on usage analysis, and, by using Adobe Campaign, they can streamline their mailings and marketing campaigns and automate operational emails on password resets and other login issues.
Today and tomorrow: improving the user experience day by day
Currently, the new portal has been live for over a year now, and almost all migration issues have been cleared. “We could celebrate a happy first birthday”, laughs Van Petegem. The new, cloud-based environment not only provides seamless, cross-channel user experiences, but it is also a very reliable and stress-proof platform, he explains: “We can handle the weekly peaks of last-minute players on closing day of more than 7,000 transactions per minute effortlessly. Did you know, by the way, that this peak is not immediately before closing time at 8 pm, but rather between 6 pm and 7 pm? An interesting phenomenon!”
In the next few months and years, the IT team will continuously devote their efforts to further improving the user experience across all channels. But there are also other worthwhile projects ahead, concludes Van Petegem: “We are investigating how we can use analytics and AI/ML to predict possible addictive behaviour. That way, we can warn and interfere with users who might be moving towards problematic behaviour. Prevention is always better than a cure.”