By Mykhailo Zborovsky, expert in strategic development of iGaming products, who is a semi-regular SBC News contributor.

Have you ever wondered how many terabytes of data in your company are simply gathering dust inside beautiful dashboards?

We are used to believing that having reports equals having control. But this is an illusion. In reality, most companies today are engaged in self-reassurance rather than true analytics. While you are still scrolling through dashboards, the market is already changing.

If you want to see how analytics, ML and Big Data actually transform businesses, take a closer look at gambling. In such highly competitive digital niches, analytics is the foundation of business survival. Without it, the product simply does not work.

Delayed analytics = a lost user

How does traditional marketing usually think? If a customer drops off, we’ll catch them with retargeting tomorrow and remind them about ourselves. However, in gambling and other digital niches, such an inert approach is simply burning the budget.

The mistake is that pauses or unusual user behavior are written off as a “cold lead.” But in reality, all of this consists of micro-signals. If a user stays on the payment screen for more than 10 seconds, this is a signal for the system. Action is required immediately.

Imagine this situation: a customer is trying to make a deposit, and the system detects three consecutive failed attempts. Classical analytics will show this the next morning as a “drop-off.” A live system reacts within the same second and offers an alternative payment method or assistance.

According to research by the Baymard Institute, payment complexity causes abandonment in more than 12% of cases. So, is it critical? Yes. Is it effective to try to bring the user back with an email half an hour later? No.

What can SaaS and B2B can learn from iGaming?

This approach scales to any business. Let’s take the SaaS model. What matters is not how often a person logs in, but what they do. The subscription is active, visits to the platform continue, but the user is using key functionality less and less. Is this a reason for concern? Yes, because such behavior may indicate insufficient service value for the client, which means the probability of subscription cancellation grows exponentially every day.

Moreover, according to Userlens, if users reduce their usage of key features, it is one of the strongest indicators that they are about to leave. If you do not respond to this now, in a month you will simply receive a cancellation email. At that point, no retargeting will bring them back because the product’s value for the customer was lost much earlier.

The same applies to e-commerce. Repeatedly viewing the same product multiple times within an hour is a clear signal of hesitation. This is exactly when it is worth offering a discount or initiating a dialogue. Otherwise, the user will simply close the tab and may never return.

People need a Lovemark

We are used to thinking that customers are looking for a “product.” However, first and foremost, customers are looking for a solution to a problem or a way to satisfy a need. Yes, high-quality service will make you a “good choice.”

But only a deep understanding of needs, based on analyzing behavioral changes, turns a brand into a Lovemark. According to TrueLoyal, more than 70% of users are more likely to recommend a brand if they feel an emotional connection.

This is the transition from intuition to evidence-based experience. It is a brand chosen through trust. And it is the result of continuous hypothesis testing and implementing flexible approaches in interfaces.

iGaming dashboards or behaviour monitoring?

Understanding the user today is definitely not psychology in its pure form. It is the result of constant hypothesis testing and the implementation of flexible algorithms into business processes. If your business is still waiting until Monday to analyse last week’s numbers, you are not managing the process. You are simply watching it happen without your involvement.

True efficiency begins where a business stops living by reports and starts reacting to user behaviour in real time. Everything else is just an illusion of control.