Tonight, the Swedish TV show Kalla Fakta will broadcast a program where they scrutinize the online gambling industry with focus on responsible gaming.
In one part of the show, a person from Kalla Fakta registers an account with the gaming site Betsson.com and calls Betsson’s customer service. In the call, the “customer” says things that could imply a gambling problem. Unfortunately, Betsson’s process failed in this case. Despite the fact that the customer service agent immediately “flagged” the customer, the customer’s case was not investigated by and monitored from a responsible gaming perspective as quickly as it should have and therefore the customer could remain active.
Kalla Fakta made the calls in April and when Betsson after the summer found out that the process had failed in one of them, Betsson offered an interview with CEO Pontus Lindwall. Moreover, Betsson’s operations went through 9,000 customer service calls and found two other cases where the process had failed. Betsson has now made necessary changes to the process to avoid this from happening again.
The show has also interviewed a former Betsson customer. This case has been featured in media before and our response remains the same: Betsson cannot give details on a specific case, but on an overall level we can say that the case is carefully examined and Betsson has not breached any regulations or responsible gaming policies. The case was also reported to the Swedish consumer agency and the consumer agency decided to close the case without taking action.
Betsson takes gambling seriously. We have offered online gambling for 20 years and in order to be in business for so long we have to have happy and healthy customers – it is a sustainability issue for us. Our revenue per customer, i.e. the net between customers’ winnings and losses, is 600-700 sek per month. We had not been able to grow and keep our customers if we had not worked with responsible gaming.
All employees undergo responsible gaming training and the customer service teams get in-depth training and regular refresher training. The independent company Global Gambling Guidance Group (G4) trained all Betsson employees in responsible gaming already in 2002. In 2007, Betsson employed a person working solely with responsible gaming, and the team has now grown to six people.
Sustainable business and responsible gaming are closely linked and Betsson uses a combination of tech systems and manual processes to prevent and detect signs of gambling problems.