The Next Era of Sports Betting Will Not Be Won on Access

The growth story in online sports betting and iGaming is about access. More states opened their markets. More consumers downloaded wagering apps. Operators added products, promotions, payment options, and increasingly sophisticated tools. And by 2025, U.S. commercial sports betting generated $16.96 billion in gross gaming revenue on $166.94 billion in wagers, while iGaming generated another $10.74 billion in revenue.

Those are meaningful numbers. But they are not necessarily the numbers that will determine which brands succeed over the next five years. The next phase of this industry will be less about earning access to customers and more about earning permission to remain in their lives.

That permission must be earned as the environment surrounding sports betting and iGaming is changing. Public concerns about the social impact of wagering are rising and responsible-gambling practices face greater scrutiny. State tax and regulatory structures remain fragmented while prediction markets are introducing new competitive and jurisdictional questions. At the same time, customers increasingly expect privacy, reliability, clear value, and fast problem resolution as basic features of the experience.

Revenue growth may continue, but will trust grow with it?

A Better Product Is No Longer Enough

The clearest signal comes from 2026 American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI^®) Entertainment Study data: Customer satisfaction with online sports betting and iGaming fell 3% to an ACSI score of 74, despite improvement across many of the industry’s functional benchmarks. Loading speed and reliability and variety of wagering options each improved to 79. Privacy remained the industry’s highest-rated customer experience benchmark at 80.

In other words, customers said the platforms were getting better but were less satisfied with the experience overall. It’s a response that feels like a contradiction but is simply a sign of a maturing industry.

Customers generally do not reward a company simply for meeting a standard that they now consider normal. A reliable app, a broad menu of wagering options, and convenient payment features may have been differentiators during the industry’s early growth, but, today, they are increasingly a platform’s price of entry. As every major operator improves similar capabilities, customer expectations rise along with industry performance. The result is an environment in which brands can deliver objectively better technology without creating a customer experience that feels meaningfully better.

This is why a score alone only functions as a starting point. The more important questions are what changed, why it changed, and which aspects of the experience will have the greatest effect on future trust and loyalty.

Many companies do not have a shortage of customer data. They have difficulty deciding which signals deserve action.

The Industry’s Most Important Moments Are Often Its Most Difficult Ones

The customer experience is not defined only by what happens when an app works properly, but also by what happens when a withdrawal is delayed, a settlement is disputed, an identity check fails, an account is restricted, or a customer does not understand the terms of a promotion.

In wagering, these situations involve two highly sensitive subjects: money and identity. BBB complaint data repeatedly points to unclear terms, withdrawals, frozen funds, and account closures as sources of customer frustration. Our research also indicates that weakening complaint handling helped offset gains elsewhere in the platform experience.

This turns service recovery from a customer support metric to a trust moment. Adding another feature may improve the experience for thousands of customers by a small amount. Failing to resolve a payout or account problem may permanently change one customer’s view of the brand. When making investment decisions, the lowest-rated experience is not automatically the first place a company should spend. What matters is the relationship between performance, customer expectations, loyalty, and the business consequences of failure.

That is where driver-based research becomes particularly useful. Brands need to understand which breakdowns create temporary frustration, which lead customers to switch platforms, and which have wider implications for reputation and public confidence.

Responsible Gambling Is Becoming Part of the Brand Promise

Responsible gambling is often discussed primarily through the lens of regulation and compliance. Those obligations are important, but the customer experience question goes further.

Do customers believe the brand is acting fairly? Do they understand the controls available to them? Does an intervention feel supportive and respectful? Are tools easy to find and use? What happens to trust after an interaction involving a limit, restriction, or assistance resource?

NCPG research shows significant levels of concerning gambling behavior among U.S. adults, alongside Pew reports of growing public concern about the effects of widespread sports betting. It’s worth note that online sports-betting participation increased between 2022 and 2025 while the share of Americans who view legalization as bad for society rose to 43%.

For operators, this creates a business issue as well as a societal one. A responsible-gambling tool can be present without being understood and used without improving confidence. An intervention can satisfy a procedural requirement while still leaving the customer feeling confused or dismissed. The actionable question is therefore not simply whether protections exist. It is whether customers experience the brand as safe, transparent, and acting in their interests.

Independent research can help operators measure that distinction. It can identify differences among casual, frequent, multi-product, lapsed, and complaint customers, and determine whether responsibility initiatives strengthen perceived care and trust across those groups.

Convergence Will Make the Experience More Convenient and More Complex

Sportsbooks, online casinos, fantasy products, entertainment content, loyalty programs, and prediction markets are moving closer together. That convergence presents a clear opportunity as customers who use both sportsbook and casino products reported 4% higher satisfaction with their experience compared to sportsbook-only customers in the 2026 ACSI Study. Satisfaction with their experience was also 11% higher compared to casino-only customers. The share of respondents using both products also increased from 25% to 29%.

That result supports closer examination of integrated customer journeys, but it should not be interpreted to mean that cross-selling automatically causes higher satisfaction. Customers who choose multiple products may differ from single-product users in frequency, engagement, needs, or familiarity.

The more useful takeaway is that an integrated ecosystem creates a new experience to measure. A shared account may reduce friction, but it may also create new questions about wallets, identity verification, privacy, consent, terms, and responsible-gambling controls. Convenience may improve while the consequences of an account or payment problem become more extensive.

Brands need to know whether trust transfers across their ecosystem. A customer who trusts a sportsbook may not automatically extend the same confidence to casino products, a prediction exchange, or an AI-powered recommendation. Measurement therefore needs to follow the full customer relationship, not remain confined to an individual product.

Prediction Markets May Reset Customer Expectations

Prediction markets present one of the industry’s most consequential uncertainties. When operated through federally regulated venues, they are structured differently from state-licensed sportsbooks. Their precise regulatory boundaries, particularly for sports-related contracts, remain contested. Customers, however, may not think in jurisdictional categories.

Bettors may simply compare the experiences available to them: the breadth of events, clarity of pricing, apparent probability, liquidity, settlement confidence, fees, and the ease of moving money. Prediction markets can offer tradable prices, year-round topics, and event categories extending far beyond sports. Their growth may therefore affect expectations even among customers who continue to use traditional sportsbooks.

This creates a valuable research opportunity. The industry needs objective baselines for whether customers understand contract prices and fees, trust settlement sources, believe markets are fair, and feel confident that disputes will be resolved appropriately. It also needs to understand the customers who use both sportsbooks and prediction markets, rather than assuming the same experience drivers apply to each audience.

These are customer research questions. They should not be confused with certification of market integrity or regulatory compliance.

Security, Payments, and Reliability Are One Customer Promise

Internally, organizations may manage cybersecurity, fraud, payments, geolocation, platform reliability, and customer service through separate teams. The experience, however, is far from separate: A failed withdrawal may feel like a payment problem, a security concern, or a sign that the company is treating the customer unfairly. A geolocation failure may be technically correct while still producing a confusing and frustrating experience. An overly aggressive fraud control may protect the platform but undermine confidence among legitimate customers.

I argue that these areas should be treated as one customer trust system. Risks such as credential attacks, payment dependencies, inaccurate data, geolocation failures, outages, and support problems can all affect the customer’s willingness to return or recommend a platform.

Operational metrics remain essential, but do not fully explain whether the experience changed customers’ perceptions. That requires linking technical performance with customer evidence: perceived privacy, withdrawal confidence, effort, resolution satisfaction, trust, and future loyalty.

The Industry Needs a Research Partner, Not Another Dashboard

The challenge facing sports betting and iGaming companies is determining which risks matter most to their customers, which customers are most affected, and which investments are likely to improve the relationship. That is where ACSI is best positioned to partner with the industry.

ACSI’s cause-and-effect model examines satisfaction as an outcome of customer expectations, quality, and value, and connects satisfaction with outcome behavior. The 2026 study is based on 30,886 completed surveys, and ACSI clients receive confidential, competitive and best-in-class benchmarking that can move the conversation beyond score reporting.

An isolated number is nothing, a repeatable evidence-based system helps brands track drivers of satisfaction and loyalty over time, compare competitive performance and relative segments, measure high-friction customer journeys, and understands improvements compared to expectations. ACSI technology investigates and quantifies the loyalty consequences of complaints and weak service recovery, and evaluates trust and transparency to identify where investment is most likely to change customer outcomes.

This approach is especially important in a category where performance can improve underneath a declining satisfaction score. Without competitive, historical, segment, and driver context, leaders may see stronger operational numbers and assume the customer relationship is moving in the same direction.

Sometimes it is not.

The next five years will bring more products, more integration, more sophisticated personalization, more scrutiny, and likely more disagreement about where gaming ends and other forms of event-based participation begin.

Despite my best guesses on prediction platforms, nobody can predict every regulatory decision, competitive shift, or technology that will shape the market. Brands can, however, build a better system for understanding how customers respond.

The strongest operators will know where expectations are moving, which failures cause lasting trust damage, how the needs of different customer groups diverge, and whether their customer experience investments are improving loyalty.

The real value of an independent research partner like the ACSI is that it helps brands distinguish technical progress from progress customers actually reward. And, in a market where access is becoming common, that understanding may be the most important competitive advantage of all.

Is your customer experience strategy prepared for the next phase of sports betting and iGaming? Connect with ACSI to explore an independent benchmarking and research program built around your customers, competitors, and future growth priorities.