Staying ahead of customer issues when it matters most, with Novibet

We sat down with Afroditi Pina, Customer Operations Director at Novibet, for a conversation about something most iGaming operators know is coming but never feel quite ready for: peak season!

With the Champions League Final coming up and the World Cup starting soon, the timing couldn’t have been better. Afroditi joined us directly from Athens, and over 30 minutes gave us one of the most honest accounts we’ve heard of what it actually looks like to run a high-pressure customer operations team through its biggest moments.

Here are the moments that stood out.

1. The old way of catching problems cost at least an hour, every time

Before Novibet had real-time visibility into their customer conversations, identifying what was going wrong during a spike followed a predictable pattern. The first two or three customers reporting an issue would be treated with scepticism. By the fourth or fifth, the team would start to suspect something was genuinely wrong. Then the discussion would begin: 

• Was this a platform error? 
• Perhaps an agent misunderstanding? 
• Maybe a communication problem?

In the best-case scenario, Afroditi told us, that process took an hour:

“Up until you get to the point where you are certain of what the issue is, it might be too late. Too many customers are already in the queue, they’ve already had a bad experience, and eventually that leads to churn and revenue impact.”

In iGaming, that hour has a real cost. Most players use two or three platforms simultaneously and a bad experience during a major event doesn’t just lose you that session. It loses you the customer.

Learn more: Download our Customer Visibility Playbook

Real-time detection changes what’s possible during a peak

Novibet use EdgeTier’s Sonar for anomaly detection across their contact centre. When something unusual starts to emerge in customer conversations, Sonar flags it almost immediately with context on what’s happening, how many customers are affected, and what they’re actually saying.

Afroditi shared a recent example from Brazil, where Novibet sponsors a well-known football club. During a commercial promotion tied to the club’s 114th anniversary, contacts started picking up. Sonar detected an issue with the promotion’s terms and conditions fast enough for the team to alert the commercial department, who fixed it on the spot.

What would have previously taken over 30 minutes to identify was resolved before it had time to build into something serious.

The shift in how Afroditi thinks about her team’s role is significant: they’re no longer waiting to be told something is wrong. In most cases, they’re the first people in the business to know.

Learn more: How to go from being a reactive to proactive contact centre

Peak season is never just existing customers

One of the things Afroditi raised that doesn’t always get talked about: peak events bring two different problems at once.

Your existing customers are doing more; they know the platform, they’re engaged, and volumes are high. But at the same time, large numbers of new customers are arriving, acquired through promotions tied to the same events driving the spike.

New customers need more care. They don’t know the platform and they’re also the customers you most need to retain. The goal of a major event isn’t just the revenue generated during it. It’s building the habit that brings those new customers back.

“The stake here is to have you back, and have you play again and again. Keeping the majority of their loyalty on your platform is a game changer.”

Voice of the customer only works if it reaches the people who can act on it

Novibet’s voice of the customer programme now runs from the company owner downwards. Quarterly reports go to the whole business, are discussed at C-level, and feed directly into product, IT, and commercial decisions.

That didn’t happen easily. For a long time, the team produced the reports, discussed the findings, and not everything got through. The turning point, Afroditi told us, was making the data measurable and quantifiable, not just surfacing what customers were saying, but showing the revenue impact of addressing it.

“We had to make the findings measurable. Tangible, not only showing the impact on operations and revenue, but quantifying the significance of the change it would make if we were to address those issues. Rather than isolated, small stories. It’s a big story with numbers. That’s the way.”

Their ambition now is to move from quarterly to monthly reporting as a minimum, with daily spot checks when needed to get a real-time view of customers. The launch of Ask Spotlight  (EdgeTier’s new agentic AI analyst tool) is what makes that realistic. That very morning, Afroditi used it to investigate a sudden spike in tickets from Mexico. A question that would previously have needed an analyst and several hours had an answer in minutes.

Learn more: Ask Spotlight – your contact centre data answering back

The CS team has become a strategic asset

Three and a half years ago when Afroditi joined Novibet, the team was “just customer support.” Today, other departments like product, marketing, IT, and leadership actively bring the CS team into their work because they know what the data holds.

The insight sitting in customer conversations, across nine countries and multiple languages, is something only the CS team has direct access to. EdgeTier makes it possible to extract that insight at a scale that spreadsheets and manual sampling never could.

“People, more than ever now, see that we have insights they can use to evolve as a company. Not just our own department, not just one aspect of the customer journey, overall as a company.”

On AI adoption: honest is better than cautious

One of the best moments of the conversation came when Afroditi was asked about change management, specifically, how she handled the understandable anxiety her team had about AI.

Her answer was disarming. She told us that while there is still some legitimate nervousness around AI, it can’t completely replace the role of people in CX.

Her reasoning is worth repeating: the human mind doesn’t need prompting to think. AI does. And until that changes, the verification, the judgment, and the context that experienced agents bring is irreplaceable.

The practical advice for introducing AI to a sceptical team: keep people involved, be transparent about what the tool is for and what it isn’t for, and be honest about what’s in it for them.

Heading into the busiest few weeks of the year

Afroditi was refreshingly candid about the nerves that come with peak season, no matter how well-prepared you are.

The confidence she has going in isn’t the confidence that nothing will go wrong but that when something does, she’ll know about it immediately, she’ll know what it is, and she’ll know who to call.

“Even if something goes wrong, we are very confident that we will know what it is, and that we will know who to address so that we can fix it as soon as possible. That’s as much as you can do in events like these.”

For any iGaming operator navigating their own peak period right now, that’s probably the right frame.

You can watch the full webinar on demand [here]. If you’d like to see how EdgeTier works in practice, [get in touch].