Veikkaus & Sisal Cases: Innovations from the North and the South

Innovating for the Benefit of Retail & Digital Customers - Lottery Cases:

Case Veikkaus - Karri Paavilainen, Vice President, Strategy & Business Intelligence

Veikkaus has up to 1.3 million registered customers. Their demands for the services are tough: if it’s not made for me, I’m not interested. Veikkaus makes use of customer intelligence to develop various sectors, including product development, actual behavior vs. survey behavior, direct marketing campaigns (email, sms), next best offer to be used by retailers, triggered customer messages (email, sms), automated reminders for low account balance, subscription period ending, mass-marketing, target group definition and results measurement, website contents and personalized draw experiences, and overall content relevancy measurement.

"In the future, we will be offering more and more tailor-made services. The points-of-sales will be provided with more digital surfaces and a chance to self-service gaming instead of queuing up to buy a ticket. Internet gaming is turning more entertaining and social. Young people between 18 and 29
years of age, who are not interested in the traditional lottery games, will be offered more entertaining services, including VeikkausTV, through which they can also get to know our other services”. 



Case Sisal - Francesco Parola, Director, Product & Business Innovation

For Francesco Parola, innovation and process are closely interlinked issues.

"An idea is not enough. We also need a process; but a process cannot replace an idea. We need a balance between them.”

According to Mr Parola, Sisal’s experiences and lessons learnt can be summarized in four main points: "Have a strategic foresight on customers’ behaviour, focus on innovation for matching their expectations, look at the marketplace as a whole, retail & digital. Define Key Performance Indicator and measure outcomes. There’s always room for improvement”.

Mr Parola does not see a difference between digital and retail customers. It is the focus that makes the difference. "Focus Your Organization on tailor-made innovation." The Tailor himself has been leading innovation team and designing games for 24 years.

"I still do not realize how and why it all happened." Italy is a country of poets, navigators, dreamers, inventors and gamers. To his own innovators, Francesco Parola gives the advice that they should have faith in themselves, and a warning that they should not copy others – or else they might end up like Charlie Chaplin when he took part in a Charlie Chaplin lookalike competition – and came in third.