“A company’s employees are its greatest asset and your people are your product“
This well-known quote from Richard Branson is of course particularly true for companies in the sports betting industry.
The team represents the backbone of a sports betting company. It is the skills, knowledge and experience of the employees that contribute at least as much to the company’s success as the sports betting platform itself.
It is essential for sports betting providers to optimally build up their team and to staff the various departments correctly so that they can work with the greatest possible efficiency.
How does my team have to be structured?
The basic tasks within a sports betting company can be roughly divided into the following areas:
Backoffice/cash handling
In retail operations such as local betting offices and shops, employees in the back office are primarily concerned with handling and managing money transactions. Since large sums of money are processed in sports betting, trustworthy employees must be selected according to strict criteria (impeccable reputation, detailed background checks) and suitable monitoring processes must be established. In addition, all of the business premises should be secured with a logging access system and access should be prohibited to non-company persons. Depending on the respective legal situation, comprehensive video surveillance in betting shops is a good investment – on the one hand, it serves as a deterrent, on the other hand, anomalies and disputes can be resolved more easily with appropriate evidence.
Finance/controlling
In order to maintain an overview of the cash flows in the company (and as a monitoring authority for the back office), at least one other, highly trustworthy person is usually employed who reports directly to the management – ideally, this person has an accounting / economics background.
Customer support
In order to be able to offer high-quality customer service, a separate support department is usually set up. This deals with customer inquiries about placed bets, KYC, login problems, etc. and is essential to generate trust with bettors. The areas of responsibility of customer support are differentiated from technical support, which is usually carried out by the platform provider. Sufficient employee training and regular control of the support quality (in the form of an assessment of the support conversation through surveys, as well as by measuring some parameters such as “conversation length”, “time until solution” etc.) are also essential.
How customers perceive your company depends very much on the quality of your customer service – it is accordingly important that employees deal with your customers’ inquiries in a friendly and competent manner at all times.
Marketing/sales
A trained marketing and sales department is required in order to promote your company’s growth, pursue your marketing goals to acquire new customers and at the same time ensure a constant reactivation of existing customers. This department manages all marketing measures and is responsible for their preparation and implementation.
Read also on this topic: Successful marketing in the sports betting business
HR & affiliate management
As your sports betting business grows, it makes sense to set up your own Human Ressources department to take care of all in-house HR processes. These include recruitment and selection, organizational management of personnel development measures, support for employees, processing, etc.
If your company works with affiliates, it is also vital to ensure that qualified contact persons are available for them in-house at all times. Since the quality of the relationship with your affiliates has a direct impact on their performance, with increasing growth there are often separate affiliate departments that are focused on recruiting new affiliates and managing the relationships with existing affiliates.
Risk management/KYC
Sports betting is always associated with a risk. In order to protect your company from fraud, errors or excessive gains of betting customers, you need a capable risk management team. With your own risk management department, these requirements can be covered in-house by your own people. Such a department usually includes trained bookmakers and risk managers who are busy 24/7 overseeing players, events and betting.
Important: When planning your own risk management, you should ensure that the internal risk management processes are supported by your sports betting software.
Often there is also the option of outsourcing your risk management processes to the software provider. At Arland, we offer our customers the opportunity to use our bookmakers’ many years of know-how for their business and to have risk management run entirely through us.
With the help of MTS (Managed Trading Services) from BETRADAR, a large part of the risk management can also be outsourced, which greatly reduces the necessary size of your own team. This means that employees are only required to determine the sports betting offer for the platform and act as an additional, human control body.
Specially trained staff is also required for the KYC (Know Your Customer) processes in your company. Often this area overlaps with the tasks of your risk management team.
Read more on the topic KYC in the sports betting business here.
The size of your team ultimately depends a lot on how big your sports betting company is. In general, at the beginning several of the above functions can be performed by one and the same person, as is usually the case with startups, and even as your company grows, it is possible that some of the areas mentioned overlap.
In sports betting, there are many and large movements of money compared to other industries, which is why strict controls of your employees and processes are essential. It is therefore important to continuously monitor the efficiency of your departments and your team and to derive appropriate steps and adjustments. Trust is good – control is better.
The Arland experts will be happy to advise you individually on the optimal structure of your sports betting company’s team! If you are interested or have any questions, just write to us at [email protected]