Kaizen Gaming’s Vangelis Dedoulis on What Makes a Loyalty Programme Players Actually Value | Exclusive Interview with iGaming News Today

Vangelis Dedoulis has worked across engineering, operations, commercial and product leadership, and is now Director of Product, Gaming and Rewards at Kaizen Gaming.

In an exclusive interview with iGaming News Today, he was asked what separates a loyalty programme players genuinely value from one that simply exists on paper. His answer is a retention argument rather than a product one.

Loyalty is not a points system

“A good loyalty program is much more than a system where players collect points,” Dedoulis told iGaming News Today.

What he thinks it should do instead is “recognise and adapt to individual preferences in real time, and create experiences that players genuinely look forward to”. His reasoning for why generic schemes underperform is short: “Personalization is key because every player values something different.”

He added an operator-side condition that often gets skipped. Loyalty also needs “a strong, scalable infrastructure that works across different regulated markets”, delivering both player value and commercial results, not one at the expense of the other.

From reactive to anticipatory

The shift Dedoulis expects is one CRM teams will recognise immediately. He told iGaming News Today he sees AI moving operators “from being reactive to becoming anticipatory, recognizing playing patterns in real time and responding before events happen”.

He was careful about where the human stays in that loop. The teams that succeed, he said, will be the ones that pair AI’s pattern recognition “with clear human decision points, using AI to surface and draft, while people retain judgement over what actually ships”.

Personal, without feeling pressured

Asked what separates a good experience from one players remember and return to, Dedoulis set out a line worth pinning above any CRM calendar: “The player should feel the product understands them, without ever feeling pressured.”

He called that balance genuinely hard to get right, and said it is where the best product teams spend most of their energy. Looking further out, he expects “the boundaries between products, rewards, and personalization” to keep disappearing into a single connected experience.

What else Dedoulis covers in the exclusive interview

• Where he sees the biggest opportunities for AI in product development and player engagement
• Why he says personalisation and responsible gaming are two sides of the same coin
• The two qualities he believes define a successful product leader in gaming today
• How Kaizen Gaming keeps innovating across multiple regulated markets at once
• What engineering, operations and commercial roles each taught him about building products
• What he expects to define the next generation of gaming products by 2027
  
  

The full exclusive interview with Vangelis Dedoulis is published on iGaming News Today.