The gambling industry is set to celebrate Safer Gambling Week from the 13th to the 19th of November, 2023. This is an opportunity for those in the industry to discuss and promote safer gambling practices that ensure both customers and businesses are better equipped. Safer Gambling Week is a campaign that cuts across the industry, urging bookmakers to place an increased focus on safer gambling tools and practices geared toward protecting customers year-round As we enter into Safer Gambling Week, we want to take this opportunity to extend our support for the cause and share insightful perspectives from Serve Legal.
Further information can be found on the Safer Gambling Week website, where links are provided for support, training and grants: https://safergamblinguk.org/get-involved/resources-for-professionals
Safer Gambling Practice
Gambling is known to be potentially addictive to some individuals, with incentives ranging from entertainment or a hobby, to the thrill of winning money, socialising with friends or to show support for a sports group or club. With the proliferation of online gambling opportunities, customers no longer need to physically visit bookmakers, bingohalls, or racetracks to place their bets. Gamblers can now multitask their activities with betting and spinning as they watch TV or work as they gamble through online apps, websites, and games.
Bookmakers and gambling venues have a continued responsibility to promote a safe gambling environment for their customers. In this regard, they use the Think21 and Think25 policies to manage age verification, alongside ongoing efforts to tackle underage gambling. Customers are able to access support and guidance online through affiliated charities and organisations as well as placed limits of their personal use: this could be limited betting times or spends as well as self-exclusion from some gambling venues.
How Serve Legal Help
Serve Legal has been passionate about supporting the gambling sector since 2009 in managing their responsible retailing approach through Age Verification testing. Thus far, we have conducted over 326,000 audits in the gambling sector alone, which has enabled many individual sites to better understand their unique compliance requirements, measure, and improve their age verification compliance. Our individually tailored audit programmes have helped leading bookmakers and gambling providers across the UK to better their compliance levels over the last 14 years.
We are proud of our service offering, which has been going strong for 14 years. We see more clients joining us year on year to improve their gambling compliance and promote the responsible retail approach that Safer Gambling Week is supporting. In addition to conducting age verification audits, we have recently added a Customer Experience and Customer Interaction Audit program to support gambling compliance. These bespoke audit programs simulate a customer who appears distressed in the gambling establishment, which aims to stress test and hold the industry accountable for providing the support they promise to offer. Additionally, the program provides invaluable situational experience and training, which has positively impacted staff's understanding of their customers' welfare.
Completing this significant number of audits annually requires a highly trained and dedicated team of nationwide auditors. At Serve Legal, we prioritise our workforce's well-being, and our internal team are trained to identify possible concerns with our auditors. Furthermore, we utilize our PowerBI technology to track auditor spendings and timings, ensuring that we keep up with auditors who may be at risk themselves.
As we look forward to 2024 and beyond, we are excited to expand our safer gambling audit programs through our Customer Experience and Interaction Audits. These programs are aimed at generating useful insights for our clients on customer safety and satisfaction, in addition to providing staff training and response protocols.
Next week, we will be hosting a Safer Gambling Forum for our clients to come together, share best practice techniques, and discuss common issues facing the industry. We will share further insights on this event closer to the time.
Get in Touch
Should you wish to learn more about our service offerings, please feel free to email us businessenquiries@servelegal.co.uk.