With second-screening becoming more and more important to sports and betting app users — 90% of US adults are now online while they watch TV — we thought it was time to highlight some of the reasons why you might be giving your customers a less-than-optimum online experience.
We’ve just produced a new white paper on the topic and it’s called 6 Ways to Lose Sports and Gaming Customers Through Poor Realtime UX.
There’s a download link for you at the bottom of the article but, in the meantime, here’s a brief summary of the issues we believe could be contributing to customer churn.
1. Latency’s too high
According to a 2017 OnePulse survey, “Nearly 70% of consumers following live sports on a mobile app would look for an alternative if the app was slow or not working”. For your customers to perceive your app as “live” you need latency to be between 5ms and 200ms. Under 100ms should be your target.
2. Screens aren’t synchronized
If you’re second-screening with a betting or sports app, you want your online screen to be in total sync with your TV’s live programming. In-play and Cash-out features in betting apps make this a must-have to guarantee a satisfying user experience. It’s vital your realtime data platform can deliver this.
3. Loss of connection when changing network
With many realtime platforms, issues can arise as your customers move between 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi, or lose connectivity completely. Customers who’ve lost connectivity may well refresh their app, which rebuilds the game and event state from scratch — which is, of course, far from ideal.
4. Uptime isn’t 100%
Looking at a platform’s uptime can be very misleading as a way of measuring your service’s availability to customers. It’s common for a device to suffer from a network partition or an intermittent and unreliable datacenter. During this time, a platform could legitimately report 100% uptime. However, with many platforms, your customers may not be able to access the service for an extended period of time — perhaps up to half an hour.
5. Data isn’t delivered in the right order
If your online app’s updates aren’t delivered and displayed in the order they actually happened, your customer could, for example, place bets using incorrect information. Their bets will be rejected and their experience with your app will be extremely frustrating. Check your realtime platform can deliver your data in the order you intended.
6. You can’t deal with spikes in demand
When you’re choosing a realtime data platform to partner your online sports or betting app, you need to know that, regardless of the number of active users, the amount of work required of your servers remains constant. It’s the unpredictability of sport that makes it so exciting for its billions of fans worldwide; you need to ensure that your network isn’t compromised when the demand for second seconds far exceeds the levels you’ve anticipated.
Download the full white paper.
To read more about the six key issues facing second-screen dependent sports and betting apps, and how Ably Realtime can help you avoid them, download the full white paper here: 6 Ways to Lose Sports and Gaming Customers Through Poor Realtime UX.
