One of the world’s most famous brands, Microsoft is known throughout homes and businesses thanks to its Windows operating system and a broad variety of software applications. The company is bringing its considerable knowledge to a hospitality-based solution for resort casinos which could help increase your bottom line by helping your staff keep your customers happy.
Integration is the key word; what Microsoft is offering is the ability to have every application you use within your operation speaking to each other, so crucial information regarding customer care is accessible to the right staff at the right time. Like most great ideas, it’s perfectly simple and can help give you an edge in customer retention.
Microsoft’s Global Managing Director for Hospitality, Matt Muta, spoke to Casino International.

Casino International: Could you give our readers a basic run-down of what Microsoft is bringing to our industry?
Matt Muta: Our solutions from  within the gaming space are really from a platform standpoint; when you think about Microsoft within the gaming space you’re thinking about Microsoft for traditionally who we are, as a software platform company. What we did, and what we showed during G2E 2007, was an extension of our platform by leveraging partner applications that basically reside on top of the Windows platform.
The idea came about because of three areas of focus which have been stressed to us by our customers; integration, business intelligence and the overall guest experience. It’s multiple solutions residing within our industry partner ecosystem of solution providers.

The first thing we were showing in our G2E space was the idea of this integrated experience of a guest  checking in, whether that was online, via a calling service or travel agent or being physically on site, and what happens after that check in process is invoked, if you will. Once the check-in process happens, all these systems are notified throughout the property, via the technology to basically create an awareness across that property: for example, Bert has checked in to the property and from there, we need to know any information about Bert from a gaming standpoint, from an accommodation or lodging standpoint, any retail transactions… basically the historical history of Bert throughout my property or properties.
The second part is really understanding that I’m getting all these bits of information from various applications, whether it’s before you get to the property, during  the property or post property, you’re gathering bits of information from multitudes of channels, and the challenge  is simply: I have all this information – how do I get to it? How do I make it work together? And what do I do with it now?
The whole point is not only about business intelligence, business insight, it’s not the fact that you’re just  gathering this information, it’s not the fact that this is a new concept; the point of what we’re showing is that technology has reached a maturity level where we’re able to go and integrate into what has been commonly referred to as silos of information that you’re not able to get to. More importantly we’re able to get that information and merge it through a common information structure whereby your business, your operators are able to take that information and derive meaningful  business out of that.
Coming back to my example of Bert checking into a property, if I know that Bert historically buys tickets to shows and historically uses my spa services, and historically plays Blackjack but he preferably likes to do that in the day, and then in the evening he likes to play Poker, then I as a property can come back to you and offer things that are more contextual to you, rather than getting these blanketed  approaches saying  “hey Bert, I know you’re a member of our  loyalty programme so these are all the things that we’re doing” rather than saying “hey Bert, I know you’re a member of our loyalty programme and I know you like to do x y and z, so we will pre-arrange this stuff for you”. The BI [Business Intelligence] effect of it is huge; every mailout you send to a customer could be tailored to that customer perfectly, which will help drive business in an extremely cost-effective way.
BI from what we’re seeing is a tremendous spend area in the space right now. We’ve come to a point now where technology can do a whole lot more than what was promised say five or ten years ago, so we’re starting to see a tremendous re-investment within the BI space, mainly to drive a 360 view of you as a consumer, as a guest, as a gamer. You’re starting to see, in the space, more and more of the Casino resort operators look  toward this holistic view of an individual, as opposed to just looking at them as a gaming opportunity.
Additionally, the third piece of that is really where we’re starting to see a lot of traction now which is in the whole experience side. A lot of companies are starting to look at technology as an opportunity area and not just as a cost to doing business, and what’s driving that is this push to have differentiation at the guest experience level. Operators generally are looking at the space and they’ll phrase questions like “Well, what can we do with technology that can drive above and beyond what anybody else is doing today, yet it’s meaningful for us, it’s not technology for technology’s sake”. More things are happening from the aspect of mobility, and we show customers a little bit about the creativity happening on mobile platforms right now, whether it’s notification with hand-held devices, for operators themselves, from the people that are actually delivering the service, to actually presenting things to you and me as a consumer of the property, via my mobile device prior to me getting there, the ability to let me check in, the ability to make reservations, the ability to use poolside menus, dynamic digital displays, so things like that are going above and beyond.
We’re also seeing tremendous interest right now in what’s commonly referred to as identification services or location-based services, which essentially is a customer carrying some sort of a token, within our portable devices, whether that’s our mobile phone or another device that we might have on our property that basically invokes or triggers events to happen in kind of a digital environment. For example passing by a screen and the screen doing a recognition that it’s me, showing me my calendar, enabling me to make restaurant reservations, things like this. That particular component is also getting a lot of interest from the gaming community or gaming operators today.
The goal is to make a seamless interaction between guest and property, and part of that goal is not just to push to that customer and gather information, but to give the customer information which is immediately actionable, so it plays off the impulse of the consumer or guest within your property without being intrusive.
CI: Intrusive is a key word there. Customers don’t want to be marketed to in an obvious way, but to have opportunities presented that they can take advantage of themselves, so they remain with an empowered feeling…
MM: Most of the conversations I have with our customers are all around “I want to use this technology, I want to do these things not for technology’s sake, my goal is privacy or not being overly intrusive”.

CI: Of course, the flip side of this is a customer might check in and the receptionist sees the message “Customer likes to be left alone!” If that’s what someone wants in a stay and they get no fuss or bother, they’ll keep coming back, so it’s still an effective tool even though it’s in a very different way.
MM: The casino resort space is such a blurry area as every aspect of hospitality exists there – retail entertainment exists there, accommodation, food service, business functions or convention function centres… If you get a lot of business travellers, and all they really want to do is grab their key and go to their room, if you can alleviate any interaction they have to have to expedite that process,they will be very happy. There’s a big group of people that are very similar to that, while on the other hand you have people who want that experience of going up and interacting with the front desk and asking all kinds of questions about where’s the best restaurant etc. It’s really having a true understanding of who that person is walking through your door and how do I create multiple experiences to really embrace that person in the world that they want to live in. There’s various avenues right now that a lot of property owners are exploring to accommodate the different customer base or different guests, and what we want to do is help you do that but we’re also going to help you, through technology, make that a very easy, seamless process.

CI: How useful is this to a smaller casino hotel or even a non-hotel operation? If you take the hotel operation out of it, is there value in this to a non-resort casino operation?
MM: Integration is a problem with everybody, mainly because you can go out and buy a gaming management system, say a one-off floor management deal for your new casino venture; you may buy various aspects of what’s needed in your infrastructure, perhaps 30 per cent of them talk to each other. Then you have to hire a consultant to come in and integrate all of those or pay a hire fee to the application provider to do this point to point interface to another system to get it to work. Over the course of ten years, say your venture is doing really well and you’re building on to the property and expanding and starting to add in more applications and new gaming and you decide ‘hey we love this gaming company that we’re dealing with but there’s other gaming companies – they have this great stuff and we’d really like to use it as well’, so we bring them into the net.
What’s happening is you’re adding more and more to your technology portfolio and in essence what you’re doing, because of the way you’re doing it – buying things directly off the shelf and making it proprietary to them – is perpetuating this integration problem where application information doesn’t talk to other application information and so at the end of the day when I’m trying to get this ‘rolled up’ view, it’s very, very problematic.
To answer your question, we do work at that level and we can provide this platform whereby the operator is able to have this migration path from old technology to new technology. More importantly, during that time span of gaining new technologies we’re providing this integration platform that lets the customer go out and acquire the latest gaming product and integrate it into their information bus or information hub. That solution actually lets you integrate multiple applications, whether it be your retail point of sale in your gift shop or the gaming tables or wherever, we can integrate. That’s one aspect of it; the other is from a business insight/ intelligence standpoint, we’re gaining that information and even if you are solely a gaming property we’re able to do that for you as well.
I think what you’d want to look at Microsoft as, we’re a platform company that’s providing this integration level, this BI level and this experience level and so if you want to consume bits from all three of those great. If what you need is only from one of those areas, we can help you with that as well.

CI: When is this whole package available? If I were starting up a casino tomorrow, are you in a position to help me?
MM: Absolutely. We would look at what are the required components, what is it that you’re looking for exactly, look across our partner ecosystems and come back with the best laid solution.
Generally what we like to do is  meet with the customer, get a better understanding of what their needs are and then we plot the solution map from there. Our customers already have a really good idea of what they want and where they want to be and we just kind of come in and help augment that.

CI: If it’s already available, who are your customers so far?
MM: We have customers in Macua, we have customers on the Strip, we have customers across all segments. Because gaming is such a booming industry right now, we have a lot of customers across the smaller Native American casinos happening throughout North America, because of the expansion and growth happening in Macau and other parts of Asia we’re dealing with a lot of different customers there. We’re dealing with the biggest brands all the way down to the straight gaming casino.

CI: So what’s the early feedback from your customers?
MM: Early feedback has been great. The hospitality industry as a whole has really been great for us to work in, simply because they’ve really embraced us. There’s not a lot of big players in this space, most of it is very small players, very fragmented, difficult to get around, so when a lot of our customers are talking with us it’s great because they know we’re around, they know we’re not a company that’s going to fall off the face of the earth tomorrow, they know we’re a very large organisation and that we’re a technology leader, so they know if we’re talking about something, there’s a great chance that we’re able to make it happen.

CI: In terms of staff training to use this, is it being Windows-based a benefit to you? It’s the most widely-used operating system in the world, of course, and there’s huge familiarity with it out there.
MM: Why we have so many people that are interested in utilizing solutions from the Microsoft partner ecosystem, is from a training standpoint so many people are already familiar with the interface and how things work. As soon as we start to show the Windows graphic user interface [GUI] to this, people are put at ease because they realise  they’re using this every day anyway; they’re already doing email, or I’m using Word, or other Office components.
The support side of it is also interesting. What Microsoft has done a lot of work on, because you’re not going to want to replicate having a technology person live on site everywhere in a chain, is remote management and upgrades. Through our systems management and remote management capability, we’re able to do that, we’re able to do repairs, so we see more customers asking how to do X, Y and Z from the corporate headquarters.

CI: Is there one core thing that you bring with this service, one thing that stands out to potential customers?
MM: It’s the ability that operators have, the ability to finally integrate solutions. They’re going to drive better business insight and at the end of the day create an overall enhanced guest experience. It’s not about the detail of what every separate little application does, it’s the end goal. Your goal in the service industry is to have service above and beyond, and our goal as a technology company is to help operators provide that service. This service is your ability to integrate systems, to drive better understanding.

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