The other type of call from Hamar

In 2020, it will be five years since Hamar started making ‘the other type of call from Hamar’, or ‘proactive calls’ as they are really called.

Proactive calls are follow-up phone calls made to players with risky gaming behaviour and/or a high level of losses. During the call, the customer is told how much they have spent on gaming in the last year and about ways of limiting their gaming. Specific measures are agreed with the customer if the customer wants to curb their gaming. If it becomes clear from the call that the customer has a gambling problem, he or she will be given information about services offering help and treatment.

In 2019, first-time calls were made to 1,706 customers, 48 follow-up calls were made, and letters were sent to 407 customers who did not answer the phone. The company now has three full-time employees who work on proactive calls.

In 2019, we focused on four special target groups: (1) Young players aged 18-25, (2) customers who had had high losses on KongKasino in the last six months, (3) customers who had had high losses (all games), and (4) customers who had had high losses in Multix/Belago. For the year as a whole, measures were agreed for 55 per cent of the players.

In each call, Norsk Tipping asks the customer what he or she thinks about Norsk Tipping making such calls to customers. A large majority of the customers, 83 per cent, were positive and only 4 per cent negative about the company getting in touch (11 per cent were neutral).

In 2017, a major research project was conducted in collaboration with a researcher, Jakob Jonsson at Stockholm University, that looked at the effects of various types of intervention: 1. Proactive call 2. Providing customers with the same information in a letter 3. A control group that did not receive the information. The research project included three triplet sets with 1,000 customers in each. One group received a call, the second a letter and the last was a control group. The first study looking at the effects up to 12 weeks after the intervention date was completed in 2018. The second study, which looked at the effects up to one year afterwards, was completed in 2019.

The study of effects one year after the intervention showed proactive calls have a significant effect, both compared with the control group and the letter group. Customers who received a proactive call reduced their gaming spending by 30 per cent. Customers who received information in a letter reduced their gaming spending by 13 per cent, while the control group reduced their gaming spending by 7 per cent.

The scientific article was published in Jonsson’s doctoral thesis, as well as the recognised scientific journal, Addiction.

It is pleasing to see that this new measure, which Norsk Tipping initiated and started developing back in 2015, has become a well-documented measure that a number of other gaming companies have also adopted