Most iGaming operators already know that keeping a player is cheaper than winning a new one. Fewer have a structured way of actually doing something about it. That is the gap a specialist iGaming customer loyalty consultancy is built to close, and it is exactly where Loyalty Group, a Danish customer experience consultancy, has spent more than two decades building its expertise.
Loyalty Group is not an iGaming specialist by trade. It has spent over 30 years working across sectors including automotive, finance and retail, helping brands such as BMW dealerships build structured customer experience programmes. That cross industry depth is precisely what makes its approach transferable to operators looking to professionalise how they think about player retention.
Who is behind Loyalty Group
The firm is led by Mikkel Korntved, CEO and senior partner, who has spent around 25 years working on customer loyalty and customer centricity across a range of industries, including the financial sector. Mikkel is known in the Danish business community for a straightforward, sometimes deliberately provocative style, and for pushing leadership teams to treat loyalty as a serious strategic discipline rather than a marketing side project.
That leadership focus matters. Mikkel and his team have consistently argued that customer loyalty initiatives only succeed when senior management is visibly behind them, rather than delegated entirely to a marketing or CRM function. For an iGaming operator, that means loyalty cannot just live inside the VIP team, it needs buy-in from product, compliance and the executive board as well.
What Loyalty Group actually offers
Loyalty Group’s service model is built around a structured, research-led process rather than generic advice. The core building blocks include:
- Customer Centricity Maturity Assessment. A structured diagnostic that identifies what is genuinely holding an organisation back from becoming more customer centric, rather than assuming the answer in advance.
- Baseline surveys and customer research. Reliable data collection that goes beyond a single Net Promoter Score, capturing why players feel the way they do, not just how likely they are to recommend a brand.
- Project scoping and strategy. Before any loyalty programme or CX initiative launches, Loyalty Group builds a clear business case and scope, so investment is targeted at the areas with the most impact.
- Motivating management. Structured work to get senior leadership genuinely aligned and visible throughout a customer centricity project, rather than nominally supportive from a distance.
- AutoIndex-style benchmarking research. Loyalty Group has built proprietary survey tools, such as the AutoIndex programme used with automotive brands including BMW, that benchmark customer experience across a network of outlets or touchpoints. The same underlying logic, comparing performance across brands, markets or channels, translates well to comparing player experience across an operator’s different product verticals or regional brands.
Why this matters specifically for iGaming operators
Operators tend to be excellent at collecting behavioural data, deposit patterns, session length, game preference, but weaker at understanding the emotional and relational side of why a player stays loyal to one brand over another offering near identical odds or RTP. That is the exact gap a dedicated customer loyalty consultancy is designed to fill.
A structured, external assessment also brings something operators often lack internally: an outside perspective that is willing to challenge assumptions. Loyalty Group’s own positioning is built around exactly that idea, familiarising themselves with a client’s business and then asking difficult questions rather than simply validating existing plans.
Bringing structure to VIP and CRM programmes
Many operators already run VIP tiers, cashback schemes and personalised CRM journeys. What is often missing is a clear baseline showing which of these initiatives genuinely drive loyalty versus which ones simply cost money without shifting player behaviour. A structured maturity assessment and baseline survey gives operators a way to prioritise investment with evidence rather than guesswork.
What working with a consultancy like this could look like
For an iGaming business, engaging a specialist customer loyalty consultancy typically starts with scoping. That means understanding where the business currently stands, which player segments matter most commercially, and which loyalty signals are already being tracked internally. From there, a baseline survey and maturity assessment can establish a starting point, followed by a prioritised action plan that senior leadership can actually get behind.
The value is not in another generic loyalty programme template. It is in a rigorous, evidence based understanding of what is actually driving, or undermining, player loyalty in a specific operator’s business, delivered by a team with genuine cross industry experience in exactly this discipline.
The bottom line
Player loyalty is too important to be left to instinct or a single NPS score. Working with an experienced, external customer loyalty consultancy such as Loyalty Group, under the leadership of Mikkel Korntved, gives operators a structured, evidence led way to understand what is really keeping players around, and what to fix before churn becomes a bigger problem than it needs to be.
For more on how operators are approaching player experience and retention, keep exploring the latest insights from Business of iGaming.
