## 888's Return to the Netherlands Market Faces Regulatory Warning

888's reentry into the Netherlands iGaming market has encountered a significant setback. The country's gambling regulator, Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), has issued a warning citing **"poor customer service accessibility"** as a major concern.

### High Volume of Player Complaints

The operator, managed locally by ComeOn Group's Godwits Limited, resumed operations in July 2025. The KSA reported an **exceptionally high number of player reports** indicating that customer service was either unavailable or extremely difficult to reach. Additionally, issues arose with welcome bonuses not being automatically credited to players.

### Regulatory Requirements and Operator Response

Under Dutch licensing rules, operators must provide **Dutch-language customer support** to handle queries and uphold duty-of-care standards. Godwits attributed the problems to an unexpected surge in live chat requests post-launch, leading to long wait times. In response, the company has hired more staff and fixed a technical glitch that prevented some players from receiving their welcome bonuses. Affected individuals have been compensated, and the KSA confirmed receiving multiple reports on these issues.

### Strengthening Oversight and Future Implications

This warning coincides with the KSA's plans to enhance oversight of how operators influence player behavior, based on research from Behavioural Insights Nederland. An upcoming report will analyze behavioral techniques used by online gambling platforms and could result in **stricter duty-of-care guidelines**.

Michel Groothuizen, Chair of the KSA, stated:

> "At the KSA, we understand that online providers, like other commercial companies, monitor what users do on their platforms and how they can influence that to their advantage. Thanks to this research, we have a better understanding of how they do this and can also provide more guidance on negative influence and things we no longer want to see."

### Emphasis on Player Protection and Compliance

The incident highlights the regulator's focus on **player protection** and ensuring operators meet accessibility standards, especially for Dutch-speaking users. As behavioral research informs new regulations, online operators in the Netherlands may face tighter rules to curb negative influences on gambling behavior.

Godwits clarified that the issues were technical and logistical, not intentional, and emphasized ongoing efforts to improve **customer support responsiveness** and achieve full compliance with KSA requirements. This early challenge for 888's renewed operations underscores the critical need for robust support systems and regulatory adherence in the closely monitored Dutch iGaming market.

Source: iGaming Expert

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888’s return to the Netherlands iGaming market has hit a bump, with the country’s gambling regulator, Kansspelautoriteit (KSA), issuing a warning over “poor customer service accessibility.” The operator, managed locally by ComeOn Group’s Godwits Limited, reentered the market in July 2025. The KSA highlighted “an exceptionally high number of reports from players indicating that customer […]

888's Dutch iGaming Comeback Stumbles Due to Poor Customer Service Accessibility

## The Heart of Japanese Daily Life

In Japan, the **convenience store**—or *konbini*—isn't just a quick stop for emergency milk runs. It's the **center of community life**, offering everything from unique snacks to famous counter foods like the beloved Famichiki.

![Shop assistant Makoto behind the counter](https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/JvTKDDf4gQPKTETk3d3GYE.png)

## Discovering inKonbini: A Game That Changes Perspectives

The recent State of Play trailer for **inKonbini: One Store. Many Stories** reignited the excitement I felt after playing the free demo this summer. Set in 1990s rural Japan, this first-person simulator captures the **unique energy** of Japanese convenience stores—where there's a genuine sense of **care and reverence** for serving the community.

[![inKONBINI: One Store. Many Stories - State of Play Trailer | PS5 Games - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/yvnvdI3dc5E/maxresdefault.jpg)](https://youtu.be/yvnvdI3dc5E)

## Why This Isn't Just Another Retail Simulator

As someone who works in **customer service**, you wouldn't expect me to want to replicate this work in my downtime. While I enjoyed Two Point Museum's humorous take on mundane jobs, inKonbini takes a completely different approach that **fundamentally changed my perspective** on customer service.

In Western cultures, customer service is often viewed as **menial work** where staff are frequently disrespected. But inKonbini centers on finding **importance and joy** in seemingly small human interactions that shops and venues provide.

## The Immersive Experience of Being Makoto

Stepping into the shoes of student Makoto, you're encouraged to **slow down and absorb the atmosphere**—listening to cans rattling, refrigerators humming, and rain falling outside. Helping your first customer, 'Chief,' teaches you to be more attentive while revealing how a simple convenience store visit can become a **life-changing moment** for both customer and employee.

## Finding Meaning in the Mundane

The game demonstrates how **slowing down** and finding significance in small details can be incredibly fulfilling. It's easy to forget the satisfaction that comes from helping strangers or taking pride in your work—**regardless of your job title**. inKonbini encourages players to appreciate those incidental interactions, sights, and sounds, even when they seem ordinary on the surface.

**Scanning products and stocking shelves** has never felt so meaningful and satisfying. I'm eagerly anticipating the full launch next April to continue this unexpectedly philosophical journey through the world of Japanese convenience store service.

How This Japanese Convenience Store Simulator Transformed My View of Customer Service Forever

## The Organizational Lie: Why Companies Devalue Their Customers

If customers fuel our growth, then why do we subscribe to countless decisions and systems that support the **Organizational Lie**?

### The Core Problem

We have a crisis with leadership intent. We claim we value customer relationships, but our operational investment reveals that we value only the customer's transaction. There exists a **systemic dishonesty** between what we say we value versus the outcomes of the systems, models and decisions we implement daily.

### How We De-Value the Customer: The Three Biggest Lies

**The Three Biggest Lies We Tell Ourselves**

*Each "lie" represents a structural and leadership flaw that erodes customer equity and disguises extraction as growth.*

| Organizational Lie | What It Looks Like | How It Damages Customer Equity | Better Path Forward |
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------------------|-------------------|
| We sell for today's figure, not for long-term health | Sales teams prioritize short-term quota and acquisition wins while ignoring long-term relationship health | Creates churn, weakens trust, and reduces **Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)** | Shift incentives toward renewals, expansions, and multi-year relationship outcomes |
| Automation replaces, rather than enhances, human connection | AI and efficiency metrics (AHT, CPC) dominate service design, rewarding speed over empathy | Turns service into a cost center instead of a loyalty driver, degrading relationship repair moments | Use AI to augment human empathy — automate routine tasks, not relationships |
| Short-term ROI rules over strategic value creation | Leadership measures performance by immediate financial returns, not by customer impact or retention | Starves long-term growth investments and signals that relationships are expendable | Adopt **Customer Equity metrics** that link CX investments to enterprise value |

#### We Sell for Today's Figure, Not for Long-Term Health

This is the first lie: We fund acquisition, but we fear **retention**. When we define success simply as "deal closed," we reduce our customer perspective to extracted value rather than a relationship to nurture.

#### Automating the Customer Experience is Good, Until You've Removed the Human Relationship

This is the second lie: We claim we're the customer's champion, but we process as cheaply as possible. Metrics such as **Average Handle Time (AHT)**, **Cost Per Contact (CPC)**, and Deflection Rate explicitly reward moving the customer out of your system quickly and cheaply.

#### Long-Term Health is Ruled by Short-Term ROI

This is the third lie: We spend a lot of time long-term planning, but define success by the "right now." By treating customer retention as a cost center, the C-Suite systematically undervalues the most crucial asset: **Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)**.

### Rebalancing the Balance Sheet: 3 Benefits of the Customer Equity Model

If you truly intend to drive your organization's growth, you must commit to making a quantifiable difference in the lives of your customers. Correcting the structural flaws shifts the focus from cost extraction to **Customer Equity**.

#### Problem Solvers are the Catalyst for Building Relationships

When support agents and account managers shift from being "problem processors" to "problem solvers," they become "relationship builders." Empowering your front line to resolve the customer's underlying need becomes your ultimate, quantifiable anti-churn mechanism.

#### When 'What Else' and 'What's Next' Unlocks Adjacency

Removing the pressures created by transactional process metrics frees your teams to adopt a more proactive intelligence-gathering approach. This is where asking the insightful questions of "What else?" and "What's Next?" uncovers your customer's true needs.

#### Technology & AI: Fueling the Enhanced Human Relationship

The third strategic benefit is the ability to leverage technology and AI, not to replace the human relationship, but to fuel it. Technology and AI are mandated to handle the low-touch, repetitive tasks and augment the high-touch, customer interactions where speed and empathy must both exist.

### The Leader's Fork: Are You Designed for Transaction or for Customer Equity?

The Organizational Lie is not a failure of individual effort but a failure of **leadership intent**. When your operations are optimized for transaction speed and cost minimization, they are by definition designed to devalue the relationship.

As a leader, you stand at a critical fork. You can decide to carry on and continue to extract short-term profits, or you can commit to building **Customer Equity** that guarantees long-term growth.

![The Organizational Lie vs. The Customer Equity Model](https://www.cmswire.com/-/media/f4975df99fe143e6841365f8da9536c5.ashx)

The Organizational Lie vs. The Customer Equity Model illustrates the critical shift in leadership intent required to transition from short-term cost extraction to a strategy focused on long-term, predictable growth.

### The Customer Equity Model — The Choice Is Yours

The Organizational Lie is that we can achieve long-term growth by continually extracting from the short-term. The market uncertainty you face, the rising prices you charge, and the competitive threats you track are not the causes of your instability; they are the symptoms of a failure of intent.

The path to predictable, sustainable, long-term customer growth is achievable, but it requires a decisive shift. You must decide to genuinely put your customer first: to continually seek ways to solve their problems and drive your entire organization with intent toward lasting value.

If customers fuel our growth, then why do we subscribe to countless decisions and systems that support the Organizational Lie?

The Shocking Truth: Your Company's Honesty Problem Is Killing Customer Relationships

## Financial institutions are leveraging AI for improvements across multiple domains

**Bankers are keen on AI's ability to bolster their operations** in spheres ranging from **customer service and regulatory compliance** to research and enhanced security, even as they are mindful of ensuring AI does not inadvertently debase the customer experience, and that customers essentially can always reach a "live representative." Overall, the use of AI in the banking world is breathtaking, with **98% of North American institutions implementing AI** for at least one operational process as of 2025, according to CoinLaw.

![AI in Banking](https://njbmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/Banking-AiInBanking.png)

### Customer Experience

In the customer experience arena, Valley Bank's Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer Russ Barrett broadly notes that customers have varying levels of "digital trust" and that his institution is committed to "never [compromising] the fabric of that trust." He adds, "[AI] is more like [additional] optionality for the early [bank customer] adopters, but we're never going to be able to force people to go at a pace they're not comfortable with."

At some banks, **AI's assistance may be multi-layered**: While AI can answer customers' routine questions and assist with tasks such as establishing accounts, bank employees can separately place customers' more challenging questions (received, say, over the phone or in-person) into AI systems that return sophisticated answers.

Within the context of financial institutions' evolving policies and internal systems, Barrett explains, "Rather than an employee [having] to constantly poke another [bank employee] or try to call someone to get the answer, [employees] now have an [AI] assistant that will be able to field a large number of those inquiries" without having to place customers on hold or call them back.

At certain banks, **AI can also proactively reach out to customers**. For example, whereas bank customers of yesteryear might use their last paper checks before considering ordering new ones, AI can now potentially understand that the last checks have been used and automatically contact customers regarding ordering new supplies.

### Research and Preparation

**AI can additionally help with larger business-client tasks**. "AI is like having an assistant who spent the last two to three days researching your client before every meeting that you have, which is really neat," explains John Kowal, senior vice president, managing principal, and chief technology officer at Bedminster-based Peapack Private Bank & Trust. "That's the level of preparation we want for our bankers. I want our bankers to walk into their client meetings with an expert level of knowledge about the client, the prior meetings the client had [with the bank], the client's finances, and a plan for what's next. AI is helping us prepare that much faster than we ever could."

### Security and Compliance

**AI can also aid in a range of security scenarios**. Against the backdrop of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) data revealing that consumers reported losing more than $12.5 billion to various types of fraud in 2024 (representing a 25% increase over the prior year), AI helps banks improve their ability to detect and respond to both fraud scenarios and money laundering.

"We're good at detecting illicit activity like money laundering, but what we're now starting to do is detect activity that might indicate our clients are becoming victims of targeted scams," explains Peapack's Kowal. "That's important to us because AI's ability to learn about tactics and detect them in real time [as well as] find indicators that our clients might become victims of these scams is really powerful ... it's going to make life a lot more difficult for those people out there who are looking to steal money from our clients."

In the compliance realm, **manual reviews are becoming automated** and thus being completed faster and more frequently. "Instead of looking at sample selections [when] auditing, we can look at everything now because AI doesn't have a limit on how much data it can process, and we can get a more thorough look," Peapack's Kowal explains. "The human reviewer is still going to be there, but if AI can give the human reviewer a second look, we won't miss anything."

### AI Risks

Incorporating AI into banking systems doesn't come without risks, and topics including, but not limited to, **AI prompt security and securing client data** within AI systems are paramount as the technology evolves. From a cybersecurity standpoint, Valley's Barrett explains, "The only way to combat the risks of AI is to use very sophisticated AI that would be able to counter and highlight when there is an anomaly or a risk in what we are seeing, in certain inquiries, activities and consumptions; things that are very different paradigm shifts from where we have been traditionally in cyber risk."

There are other risks. Barrett says, "Banks cannot afford [AI] hallucinations. Banks cannot afford data quality issues. Banks cannot afford a misunderstanding. What that means is that the pace at which [AI] might move in your day-to-day consumption of information probably would be very concerning if that's the pace it moved your money. The underpinning of what your experience will be with these technologies [requires] a lot of hard work [including] getting the data structured, organized, controlled and of really high quality to make sure your experience is 100% reliable and explainable."

Separately, Peapack's Kowal stresses the need for **AI confidentiality**. "AI can be done securely," he says. "You do not want to put any sensitive data into Google's AI using a public account, but if a bank were to partner with Google, draw up an enterprise agreement and validate the security, [then AI] can safely be used with banking information."

### Early Adopters

While AI is evolving at many financial institutions, **Bank of America can be seen as an early adopter** in part because in 2018 the bank launched Erica® – "the first widely adopted AI-driven virtual financial assistant" – within its mobile app, which has thus far been used more than 2.5 billion times.

Bank of America says AI and machine learning technology is embedded across the company's business lines in areas including global technology, operations, and training.

"AI is having a transformative effect on employee efficiency and operational excellence," Bank of America Chief Technology & Information Officer Aditya Bhasin said in an April 2025 statement. "Our use of AI at scale and around the world enables us to further enhance our capabilities, improve employee productivity and client service, and drive business growth."

The use of AI in the banking world continues to evolve overall, and also within the realms of predictive analytics and automation as well as investment and portfolio management. While AI's future industry-wide applications aren't entirely known, Peapack's Kowal concludes, "In the industry, we're known as a technology-forward bank, but our goal is not to be the most AI-driven bank out there.

It's to be the most trusted and responsive partner to our clients. I think AI helps us get there faster. So, we keep our eye on that end goal, and AI is helping us in ways I think we couldn't have imagined."

Bankers are keen on AI’s ability to bolster their operations in spheres ranging from customer service and regulatory compliance to research

How AI is Revolutionizing Banking: From Customer Service to Fraud Detection

## The Unexpected Call That Changed Everything

Imagine working a quiet day at a **remote customer service job** for an online bookstore when suddenly your phone rings with an angry, screaming customer on the other end. This is exactly what happened to one customer service representative who shared her **unforgettable experience** dealing with a hostile caller.

![woman wearing a headset](https://twistedsifter.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/boks.jpg)

### The Calm Before the Storm

The representative, who goes by Pepper online, worked in the customer service section of an online bookstore specializing in K-12 educational materials. During winter months, her workload was typically light - maybe 3-5 calls and a similar number of emails daily. Most days were so relaxed that she could read eBooks or watch Netflix between calls.

On this particular day, she had volunteered to help with college course calls since winter classes were starting. She was taking simple calls about book returns and course orders when everything changed.

### The Screaming Begins

Pepper answered what seemed like a normal call with her professional customer service voice: "Thank you for calling Bookstore. My name is Pepper. How can I help you!"

What followed was immediate screaming - not just raised voices, but actual screeching from an elderly woman. The caller was so loud that coworkers several seats away turned to look, and her mentor Alex started rolling her chair over to assist.

### The Mystery Unfolds

The angry customer claimed she was standing outside "their building" in the cold, frustrated that no one was there to help her. She was there to get a book for a required class and couldn't understand why the building was closed.

Pepper, despite being anxious and dealing with her first hostile customer in this job, tried to de-escalate the situation. She calmly explained she'd be happy to help and asked questions to pull up the customer's school information.

### The 40-Minute Investigation

What followed was a **frustrating 40-minute conversation** where:

- The customer knew her class code but not the book title or ISBN
- She couldn't remember the course name beyond "it's about cars"
- She provided a generic teacher name that matched multiple courses
- Both parties grew increasingly frustrated as nothing matched

### The Breakthrough Moment

After nearly an hour of confusion, the customer mentioned one crucial word: "license." When Pepper asked what kind of license, the woman responded with obvious irritation: "Well a driver's license honey."

**The realization finally dawned** - this woman wasn't looking for a college textbook at all. She was trying to get her driver's license and thought she was calling the DMV or driving office!

### The Resolution

Pepper gently explained, "Ma'am, we're a Bookstore." The customer's frustration immediately disappeared with a quiet "oh" before asking Pepper to Google the number for the actual driving office.

The representative never did figure out how the customer got their bookstore's number instead of the DMV's.

### Community Reactions

The Reddit community had strong reactions to this story, with many users sharing similar experiences of customers calling the wrong businesses and becoming hostile when their mistakes were pointed out.

One commenter noted: "The number of people who call the wrong place and then get mad at YOU for their mistake is astonishing."

Another added: "This is why customer service workers deserve so much more respect - they deal with this kind of nonsense daily."

This story serves as a powerful reminder of the **unexpected challenges** customer service professionals face and the importance of **remaining calm under pressure** even when dealing with completely misplaced anger.

This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to what other people are saying…

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