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Casino Management: the art of communicating with customers?
After a period that saw parts of the industry ‘get drunk on cheap credit’, belts are being tightened across the globe. Making the most out of customers and putting existing facilities to best use are now high priorities – and Casino Management Systems have a major role to play in boosting the bottom line. Graeme Kidd takes an overview…
Advances in technology have made a major difference to casino management, not only in terms of how the business assets can be marshalled and put to best use, but in terms of how tasks can be achieved more efficiently, and thereby, more cost-effectively.
Perhaps most significantly of all, well-deployed IT technology allows casino operators to open new channels of communication with players, to gain a much closer understanding of customers and their behaviour, and to drive revenues up enhancing the customer experience, partly through targeted offers.
Managing information and functions such as accounting, machine maintenance, cash transactions and staff time more effectively also allows costs to be driven down without impairing the customer experience.
The networked floor, industry-wide open standards and protocols, and the arrival of server-based systems in casinos has already enabled a powerful shift in the way that operators can run their properties and market more effectively to their customers. Servers have not turned out to provide the ‘magic bullet’ solution that some manufacturers implied – there’s still a long way yet to go, and a massive amount of potential to realise through applying technology.
But a significant change has already taken place, now that the industry has moved away from proprietary networks and proprietary machine management systems, often provided at low or no cost by vendors in order to leverage their machine sales. Ethernet has become the ‘de Facto’ standard for casino networks, and it offers the bandwidth, or data capacity, that allows impressive multimedia content to be delivered to customers on screens of all sizes around the entire property.
Ethernet is de Facto, but not yet universal: “The rate at which it gets implemented is a question, because of the 'rip out the floor, re-run the wire' situations,” says IGT’s VP Network Systems Strategy Javier Saenz.
Where ‘legacy systems’ are in place, IGT came to realise that the trick was “to come to market with a product that you could implement on part of your floor, but that would continue to work seamlessly with the rest of your floor, so that operators could ease their way in to all these new technologies,” Saenz admits.
Atronic is also taking this factor firmly into account with the launch of its Crystal.Net platform, which builds on the tried-and-tested earlier incarnation, Crystal.Web. Simon Dorsen, Atronic’s Sales Director Systems and Server-Assisted Gaming, explains: “there are two sides to the system – the software, for analysing figures and the management side, and you have the hardware. Crystal.Web and Crystal.Net are the hardware platform on which the software works.”
“CrystalNet is the evolution of CrystalWeb...we are using the same networking technology on the floor, Ethernet, so if you have an existing floor you don't have to touch anything on the network side. On the machine level, you take out the CrystalWeb technology and you put in the CrystalNet technologies.”
“On the back end, the server is updated so it can handle having CrystalWeb and CrystalNet units on the same floor, which helps in any migration. The customer is not forced on one day to switch over the whole floor to CrystalNet, but can migrate at his own pace. The decision to go to CrystalNet does not commit to a massive financial commitment on one day to cross everything over. That's a comforting thing to our customers to think that they can integrate new technology and bring new things to their floor and to players, but they can do it at their own pace.”
Crystal.Net, as Dorsen explains it, provides a much richer channel of communication with the player than CrystalWeb, a richer channel that allows sound and video to be delivered to the point of play, and gives operators the tools they need to design the screen content, layout and colours to fit in with their own house style.
Bally’s iView, Konami’s TrueTime, Gaming Support’s Aurora, IGT’s NextGen, like Crystal Web, all seek to provide facilities that allow operators to enrich the casino customer’s experience on the gaming floor, and mainly at the point of play. Some integrate directly with digital signeage across the property, such as Gaming Support’s BaseSys Aurora, and, following Bally’s acquisition of CoolSign, Bally will also be offering enterprise-wide media management. Bally’s Executive Vice President Systems, Ramesh Srinivasan explains: “where you come up with a dynamic video, you can show it across your whole floor. When someone has just won a jackpot and you want to run a special video, you can show it on your JumboTrons outside, on your plasma televisions inside, and also on the iView. The entire management of media across the casino floor can be run from a single console. A centralised media controller provides a lot more sophistication and automation, as well as centralised control.”
A richer channel can be used very powerfully when marketing is driven by customer relationship management techniques and tools and is informed by business intelligence, particularly if that intelligence is derived in real time from data gathered over the network. Modern casino management enables the kind of cross-selling and up-selling that other industries already have down to a fine art. IGT’s Saenz: “Historically, it was 'come in the casino, play the game, and please go home so that I can send you a direct mail piece so that I can get you back'. Or maybe send you a text message or a phone call. Now it's ‘come into the casino, play the game and I will actually keep you here. I will actually market to you and take care of your while you are here’.”
Gaming Support has a parallel vision, as Nick Hogan, VP Sales and Business Development for Gaming Support, sets out: “We have a new interface board out there, which is very robust with a 64-bit processor, awesome graphical capabilities and we can put these in any machine and power beautiful LCD displays within the player transaction terminal that are completely touch-screen, that have all kinds of unique service options for players. It’s fully-integrated with our digital signage systems, so you can run all kinds of interesting promotions on those screens. That's a really slick new feature that we have put in there.”
It’s patently clear that there are a there are a lot of technologies, a lot of developers and vendors, and a lot of opportunity. The potential for enhancing the player experience goes beyond variety of game offerings, and enhancements to games such as bonusing, or jackpots, or tournament play, or community gaming.
With touch screen technologies, and the ability to use kiosks, self-service kiosks, RFID chips and players’ own mobile personal devices such as phones as a channel for delivering information and taking payment, there have never been so many rich channels available for operators to use. Operators can have unprecedented access to their customers, and use these rich channels not just to sell to them, but to reward, motivate and incentivise, and to provide appropriate gaming experiences.
Operators can also gather a mine of information about customer behaviour, so that responsive, targeted offers can be made, and made in real time, on the property.
What’s more, as Konami’s Director of System Sales, Jay Bertsch explains, the player’s experience can be significantly enhanced by providing new facilities and managing the experience.
“Konami’s TrueTime displays allow the property to provide real time, streaming video down to the floor – so players can watch Superbowl, for instance, but more importantly, so that the operator can run promotional campaigns around it. The operator can push video directly down to the floor and create a significant amount of entertainment around the property, especially when you start looking at integrating your existing display solutions in the property – you can provide the same kind of content in your players' club and your sportsbook, you can provide that content all the way down to the machine,” he says.
From a systems perspective it's okay to provide entertainment on a device, but how do you incentivise somebody to stay on a device and play? Konami, for instance, provides a tool kit, Advanced Incentives. “The module allows for what we call true time bonusing,” Bertsch says. “Depending upon on certain behaviours or criteria that are set up on the promotion, the operator can incentivise patrons based on what they are doing on the machine.” That kind of interaction enhances the player experience and the operator’s revenues…
Innovation on open platforms
The move to a standard network infrastructure and the adoption of protocols makes it easy for new vendors to contribute expertise and innovation, as Nick Hogan explains: “A lot of people struggled with the fact that hardware had been developed and put on the floor, but as the application requirements became more sophisticated, with customers wanting more player marketing capabilities, more jackpot capabilities, tickets, cards and things of that nature, it was difficult for companies to develop and place that stuff, because the hardware platforms were basically rendered obsolete. It was tough business to make money – your customers were always annoyed with you, there were service problems. We had a long period of protocol wars between Bally and IGT, SAS vs SDS, and it was a big mess and a really hard business in which to thrive.”
Today, Bally and IGT are both committed to open standards, and are happy to work together and with other manufacturers to ensure that innovative products reach casino floors. Ramesh Srinivasan explains how Bally has made its iView player communication technology work on other manufacturers’ machines, not just new Bally kit. “The beauty of the way we are doing this, is that we can make this work on current games on the floor. We don't need the game manufacturer to do anything at all. We need permission from those game manufacturers, but the casino operator will get that permission. There's a little bit more work to do on an IGT game, we have to reprogram the touch buttons, and IGT uses a specialised protocol for that, and we need them to share that protocol with us,” he says. Clearly, he envisages no real difficulties with securing co-operation.
IGT’s Saenz concurs: “We are really committed to the co-operation necessary to make the open network work. The reality is that it is no magic bullet – protocols are just a set of rules, there's nothing about how you are going to implement. Everyone is going to implement a little bit differently here and there – this is complex technology. You have to test, you have to get together and it's going to take time and commitment from all the vendors. IGT is fully committed to that.”
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