February 16, 2018

On 14 February 2018, the Gambling Commission published a guidance note for remote gambling operators on customer interaction.

The guidance sets out some of the issues around identifying potential harmful behaviour in remote gambling and serves as an inevitable precursor to the introduction of new standards in this area to the Licence Conditions and Codes of Practice.

In identifying at-risk customers, the guidance note explains that operators are expected to:

• Use a range of indicators to identify such customers and should not rely on financial indicators alone
• Monitor customer activity to “interact early, and quickly”
• Respond to any increase in demand (i.e. through growth, mergers or other internal changes)
• Train their staff (including VIP teams) to understand the role they play in customer interaction, and be supported and able to act when they spot harmful behaviour
• Ensure that customers are not more at risk because they gamble overnight or out of hours
• Ensure their VIP customers get the same level of protection as their other customers

If potential harmful behaviour is identified, operators should “assume that the customer is at-risk” until satisfied otherwise and must make all reasonable efforts to make contact and interact with the customer.

So what does the Commission mean by “interaction”? The plethora of recent public statements of lessons learnt in this area have already sent a clear message to the industry that the deployment of automated interactions to customers will not, by itself, be enough to meet the Commission’s expectations. The guidance sets out that operators should choose the type of interaction based on the extent of the potential harm (thus, adopting a risk-based approach) – from automated responses to human contact – and operators are encouraged to tailor messages based on insight about their customers. Thereafter, the impact of any interactions on customers’ behaviour should be evaluated for further learnings.

Remote gambling operators are encouraged to review their existing policies and procedures with this guidance in mind and evaluate whether they are meeting expectations, or if they could be doing more to protect consumers experiencing, or at risk of developing, problems with their gambling.  The Commission has set its expectation that operators must “invest in systems and staff” to manage these processes effectively.

This guidance note forms part of the Commission’s wider corporate strategy for 2018-21 in which it stated its expectation for operators to “intervene” to make play safe and to protect consumers who may be at risk of gambling-related harm.