Betfair extends agreement with UserZoom

(PRESS RELEASE) -- Betfair, the world’s largest betting community, has signed up to a further two year enterprise contract with UserZoom, enabling it to deploy online user experience (UX) research tools across its web, mobile and tablet user base.

With four million customers around the world enacting over seven million transactions a day, Betfair provides an ever evolving portfolio of innovative products including Betfair Casino, Betfair Exchange Games, Betfair Poker and Betfair Sportsbook & Racebook. Mariana Silva Southern, Customer Experience Research Manager at Betfair.com says of UserZoom, “There’s no one else in the market that can give us what we need.”

UserZoom provides an innovative range of UX tools & services, which matches Betfair’s needs and future developments, especially for remote customer testing across new platforms. While rich information can be gathered when users are put in front of a prototype and interviewed on a one-to-one basis, this activity can be very expensive and can typically only cover a small number of users. While Silva Southern says that Betfair continues to run these in-depth contextual interviews, she says, “UserZoom gives us a way to reach a wider audience on a one-to-one task based approach.”

Silva Southern says, “We’re constantly evolving and innovating, so we have a constant need to find out what our customers think.” She continued, “We design things in house and test. UserZoom allows us to reach a wider audience and is very useful when we need to launch something quickly. Customer feedback is the best way to get things right – we can script something and send it out for testing immediately.” She believes that optimisation is fundamental – nothing is perfect when launched but the UX tools enable Betfair to optimise quickly. What the UserZoom toolkit ensures is that product decisions are informed by customers’ needs and wants.

It was the flexibility and cost-effective nature of the licensing deal offered by UserZoom that saw Betfair sign up for a further two years. Silva Southern says, “The flexibility that UserZoom provides is a benefit – we licence not per study but per year – which means that while we have to prioritise, we can address everything that we need. By having the ongoing contract we can change any product or feature and sense check without having to worry about the economics.” She continued, “No one else competes at that level yet and we don’t expect to see it, at least for the next couple of years.”

Silva Southern said, “We love the tools because they help us understand our customers’ views on ease of use, success at performing, perceived effort, perceived time and satisfaction with the task.” At the same time, the UserZoom tool-kit enables Betfair to add other non-task based questions such as card sorting, tree testing, click image testing, timeout testing, A/B testing and multi-media feedback providing a complement to other data. Silva Southern says, “UserZoom lets us do qualitative and quantitative research, which sits well with internal stakeholders. It saves time and money, helping us to do more with less.”

Silva Southern also points out that the UserZoom tool set is very useful as an internal persuader. By enabling a quantitative approach to what many see as solely qualitative research, a more rigorous approach to the impact of UX can be made. Benchmarking studies can help the company create more effective products. And with anecdotal industry evidence showing significant financial impact through changes in language and design, setting baselines and tracking the ROI of changes on the customer could contribute significantly to the bottom line.

Arthur Moan, UK Managing Director at UserZoom says; “Having Betfair commit to a further two years having been a client of UserZoom for the past year is fantastic news and a testament to the innovation and excellent support we extend to our clients. Research is a people business, our tools offer automation of data collection and the power to reach out and collect statistically significant and highly actionable insights, however; providing strategic support and assistance on how best to utilise the methodologies we apply is key - hence our enterprise renewal rate is maintained above 90%! Betfair know UX, what they wish to achieve and in my opinion are way ahead of the game on the UX maturity that the industry is seeing. We continue to innovate and the mobile space is a huge growth area for UserZoom, clients like Betfair feed requirements into our R&D which we truly appreciate. We look forward to further strengthening our relationship over the next two years and we hope way beyond this.