Daniel Dolejsi: "We have overtaken competing forums that have been operating longer"

Let us introduce Daniel Dolejsi, Social Media and Community Lead for Casino Guru, who is responsible for the development of a multilingual gambling community and all its components. Considering his background and previous work experience, Daniel is also available as an advisor to Casino Guru's Complaint Resolution Center.

In this interview, Daniel sheds some lights on how he got into the gambling industry in the first place, revealing what his experience with Casino Guru is like in the process. He also discusses the four pillars of Casino Guru Community – forum, social media, user reviews and newsletters, presents the challenges he is currently working through, and talks about what awaits him in the future.

What is it like to build a community? What makes Casino Guru's forum stand out? What complications must be resolved when sending out newsletters or improving user reviews? Let's unveil some details!

Q: Daniel, can you outline for us what your professional beginnings were in the gambling industry?

When I graduated from college, I wanted to live somewhere where the sun was always shining, someplace warm – so I bought a one-way ticket to Malta. After two weeks of vacationing with friends, I started looking for a job. I knew from the very beginning that Malta was flourishing primarily in two industries – banking and online gambling. The problem, however, was my nationality.

In the country where I come from, at that time, in 2015, online gambling was not widespread at all. Most of the casinos did not even accept players from my country, and people like me were not employed by casinos for customer support, which is usually the first step of building a career in the gambling industry. However, at the end of the day, I was fortunate enough that LeoVegas Casino, one of the largest casinos in Europe, set out to expand their operations to my home country and offer me a position.

Q: Did you start out in customer support like most rookies?

Yes, and no. In LeoVegas, I was needed to help build brand new customer service specifically for players from my home country, so I handled various tasks, including customer support. However, having worked in the Payments and Frauds Department, my specialization was payment methods. The fact that there were basically only two of us in the company from my country quickly became an advantage for me – unlike other beginners, I got into different departments, worked with many interesting people, was more involved in different divisions, and later I focused on copywriting and marketing.

Subsequently, in 2017, I was presented with the opportunity to lead social media, as the former Head of Social Media was leaving. He took me on his team and trained me for three months before I replaced him and became the new Head of Social Media. I was primarily in charge of the German, Swedish and Norwegian markets, although I do not speak any of these languages [laughter].

Q: What made you eventually leave Malta and how did you end up in Casino Guru?

The fact that I left was mainly because the casinos had gradually ceased to thrive, which I think was due to the high turnover of employees – although that is understandable in Malta, as it's common practice there for the casinos to steal skillful employees from each other. That's when I realized I was in a rather unique position, because not many people in the country I came from have had experience with online gambling. I took my chances and reached out to several gambling companies once again, telling them more about who I am, what I do, and offering them collaboration.

That was when I heard from my future colleague, Maroš, and that's how the cooperation with Casino Guru was born. At our first meeting, I was told that they wanted to build a community within Casino Guru, which I would oversee. I was immediately drawn to that idea, since I enjoy running projects from the ground up, and it's been a long and exciting journey ever since.

Q: When you say you were at the very beginning of building Casino Guru's community, how did it all come about? What did you bounce off of, and how did this process take place?

It all basically starts with an idea. The people at Casino Guru had a project in mind, prepared in advance, and my job was to eventually execute that idea. There was some notion of a forum where the players could communicate with each other, but right from the start, we had a problem – how would players from all over the world who speak different languages understand each other when communicating? The solution was automated translation, which we managed to successfully implement.

Automated translations are the most important element of why we have accomplished building the forum so quickly and why we, in terms of traffic, have overtaken competitive forums, which have been operating longer. We have given the players a chance to communicate with each other without speaking or understanding English and, more importantly, we have enabled them to express themselves in their native language. That is our added value and the thing that distinguishes us from everyone else.

Q: How did you even figure out what a forum like that would look like?

That part wasn't so hard for me. I myself was an active member of various forums at the time, the only difference being that since then, I have become more interested in what a good forum looks like, what functions it has and so on. I have realized that even the smallest details – such as the registration process or the user profile itself – are more important than people might realize.

In my personal research, I really concentrated on every little thing, and naturally I also analyzed the gambling forums that had already been running at the time. Then I contacted a designer, showed him screenshots of functions and designs that I liked, and we started drawing the first concept together. Gradually, the forum was beginning to take on a real shape, and the rest is history.

Q: What exactly is the forum for? What are its strengths and potential?

Our forum is essentially a place where players exchange their casino experience, usually helping each other to solve problems, but there are also topics related to responsible gambling where Casino Guru can assist constructively. Another popular thread is 'Do you know a casino that isn't reviewed on Casino Guru?', where players write their tips for casinos that are not in our database yet, which is a very advantageous form of cooperation for both sides. We have about 500 responses and suggestions in this thread so far, and this is exactly what our forum is all about – teamwork and building relationships.

The potential I see is that players can find information they could otherwise not find anywhere else, precisely thanks to the diversity that we offer, but also due to the fact that sometimes the casinos themselves are involved in the conversation, which guarantees players more prompt and accurate answers to their questions.

Q: How did you get from the forum to Casino Guru's social media?

I suggested the idea myself, since Casino Guru didn't exist on social media before. And since I already had experience with managing a company's social platforms from my previous job, everybody agreed that I should set up Casino Guru profiles on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Nowadays, my colleague Radka is taking care of our social media. We also have a YouTube channel, but our team does not cover that.

Q: Who else is on your team?

That's easy to answer. There's only two of us – me and Radka, though I am trying to expand my team by 100% so that there are at least four of us [laughter]. At the moment, both of us have our hands full, but once we have more team members, I think we can easily respond to those 4,000 posts a month that come to the forum. However, I have to say that it is not just the two of us that contribute to Community – we are still working with other teams, whether that be designers, programmers, or the Complaint Resolution Center, with whom we exchange various tips and information, as it often happens that we get complaints on the forum.

Q: In addition to the forum and social media, the Casino Guru Community stands on two other pillars. Can you tell us something more about them?

That's right. Another part of the Community consists of newsletters – e-mails sent out by Casino Guru to users that subscribed to receive updates on topics of their interest. At the beginning, we mainly sent out no deposit bonuses through the newsletter, as we know that they are generally the most popular among players. But once again, we had a problem – imagine you want to send a newsletter to an Italian living in London who wants to receive it in Italian, but his no deposit bonus must be available to players in the UK, but also ideally in Italian language. And that's just one player.

It was not a simple process at all, but in the end, the system of sending newsletters was improved to such an extent that today, thousands of situations like this exist without any problems. That Italian in London gets a newsletter in his native language and his bonus will be available to him as a player from the UK. We are currently sending newsletters to 120 countries all over the world. As soon as we have five subscribers in a country, we start sending them a newsletter, and all that in just three years since the project started.

Q: What, apart from no deposit bonuses, can be found in the newsletter?

Twice a month we send out a newsletter containing new games from game providers. For a year we have been sending out selected articles from Casino Guru News, we are regularly informing our subscribers about various Casino Guru projects, such as Casino Guru Awards or the Casino Guru Academy, and many other things. At the moment, we have no problem sending anything to our 70,000+ subscribers, in all the 17 languages in which we operate, and the process is no longer nearly as time-consuming as it was at the beginning.

Q: Before we forget, what is the fourth pillar of Community?

The fourth pillar of the Community is the user reviews, which have been running for about a year and a half. They allow players to express their opinions about individual casinos on our website, and players can also rate these casinos just like you would rate a business through Google reviews. It sounds very simple, but our user reviews are currently the most difficult segment that the Community must deal with.

The problem is that casinos write fake reviews on themselves, players write false reviews to damage the casino, and they also often decide to write positive reviews for which the casino offers them some type of incentive, such as free spins. This is sometimes done with real finesse, making it really difficult for us to spot some of the fake reviews.

The whole situation is also complicated by the fact that if we accuse someone of fraud, we have to be 100% sure, which requires top-notch detective work – especially considering that we get more than 1,500 user reviews a month. This is a problem that we are constantly tackling, and we are trying to create different tools to effectively detect fraudulent reviews.

Q: What do you see as the future of Community and what will you focus on during the upcoming year?

Right now, we are focusing on upgrading user reviews – we want every user review submitted to us to have a different value, that is, to have a different impact on the final user rating that the casino receives on our website. In practice, this means that a user review from a player who registered with us an hour ago and wrote the rating on our website will have a lower overall value and a lower impact on the user rating of a casino than a review from a player who is registered with us for longer, has written more user reviews, and is approved by us.

I believe this is a very interesting innovation that most platforms do not use, but we see that it makes a significant difference – the quality of reviews varies according to who writes them and how they are written, but also according to how detailed they are. Of course, we have formulas and standardized calculations to determine the value of a user review, but we still have room to manually adjust the evaluation if we deem it appropriate.

With this improvement the histogram, which shows how many 5-star or 4-star (and so on) reviews the casino has received, will also have to change, as our new rating system will no longer reflect the average of all user ratings as it has been up to now. In addition to this big change, we would also like to add verbal comments to the final user rating. All of this implies a lot of modifications on our side, and the whole implementation process is rather difficult. At the same time, however, we believe this change is very important for the development of the whole community.

Q: What do you like most about the online gambling industry and working for Casino Guru?

What I like most about the industry is that there are certain rules, formulas, and patterns that are established and followed, and as a man who likes the order and the system of things, I appreciate that I know what to expect. And as for Casino Guru, what I like most about my position in the company is the level of freedom I have. My job gives me a unique opportunity to constantly try new things, and I am very grateful for that.

When I compare it with how things looked like when I joined the company, I couldn't be more pleased to see the progress Casino Guru has made over the years. I joined the team when there was no PR department at all, and it was a time when we did not constantly struggle with needing bigger office spaces, since we only had about ten people working in the office [laughter]. We didn't even have our own designer, and today we have four! It's great to be a part of this process and to see how far Casino Guru has come.

This interview is part of Casino Guru Insiders, a series of interviews during which experts from Casino Guru share their unique workflow, reveal insider information, and offer an exclusive overview of experience-packed know-how.