It’s pretty clear to see, today, that most bingo game operators see apps as the main way people play their games. Apps are virtually ubiquitous now, and used in every area of life—from healthcare, to our work, to games and leisure. Almost everything is done through smartphones and apps today. But how exactly do these apps help the bingo companies to optimise their games, customer experience, and profitability? There are more than a few ways, so today we’re going to do a deep dive into exactly the benefits of using apps for bingo companies.
Let’s get started.
- Ease of use
First and foremost, the best thing about apps in general is that they are just easier to use than most other mediums. They are designed with simplicity and intuitiveness in mind, and so can be picked up by virtually anyone willing to get to grips with the basics.
Apps allow you to do a lot more with a lot less. With around 3.5 million people playing bingo online in the UK, and around 350 different games available from different sites and operators, there’s clearly a lot of competition in every aspect of the game.
Given the demographics that play bingo, it’s important to make simple and intuitive ways to play the games. Traditional websites aren’t quite as good at this, and never quite achieved the ease of use that apps have so rapidly.
- Convenience
Following on from that, apps are just a lot more convenient than other mediums. Websites generally aren’t designed with the end device in mind, so even though you can access websites through a smartphone just as easily, they are not as easy to use.
Simple, fast, responsive apps mean that people can play bingo virtually anywhere. On a busy bus, train, or a doctor’s waiting room, it’s easy to jump into a quick game where ever you are.
This means that more people have begun adopting the game, meaning more customers for the bingo companies. In turn, this increase in revenue means that bingo companies can spend more improving their games!
- Speed
In general terms, too, apps have become so popular because they are much faster than websites ever really were. Faster apps mean you can more frequent games, and you can get more players in on single games without sacrificing responsiveness and speed of games.
More frequent, more highly populated games means more revenue, of course, but it also means more winners. Winning is a huge incentive to carry on playing, so the speed also inspires greater loyalty in customers, on top of simple convenience questions.
- Customer service
When running an operation the size of the biggest online bingo games, customer service requests are inevitable—and numerous. But the very same speed and efficiency which attracted players to the apps in the first place allows the companies to provide much better and quicker customer service, too.
This, too, inspires greater loyalty in customers. They are much more willing to continue playing if they have a positive customer service experience.
Though this might sound like it helps the customer more than the business, robustly dealing with issues like this is vital to maintaining your player base and reputation.
- Advertising
Finally, the app model has also allowed bingo companies to bring in other sources of revenue—via in-app advertising. They must still be careful about the extent of this, of course, to avoid making their UI unattractive and putting users off. But done properly, most customers won’t even notice them, and it means another way to make money out of the app.
Again, most of this money is going to go back into further developing their apps and games to better compete. The traditional bingo hall does not really allow for anything like this.
Apps are, to put it simply, faster and easier to use than almost any other medium. They are responsive, intuitive, simple to design and execute, and almost everyone has a smartphone nowadays. While the website and the bingo hall are far from completely excluded from the modern world of bingo, it is quite clear to see that the future of the industry is in apps.
