Casino operators across the world are applying customer relationship management and business intelligence techniques to their operations. These techniques are not new to the industry, and have been applied in other markets very successfully – in particular, by large retail operations for years, with loyalty cards, and by airlines, with points and airmiles reward schemes.
But the potential in the casino market is enormous – and exciting, according to Bally’s Marco Herrera, Vice President and Managing Director of the company’s MCC systems division. “I’ve seen it in retail,” he says. “If you introduce a loyalty card and provide benefits to your medium-top customers, it’s just amazing the amount of business you can get. It wasn’t uncommon to see in the retail industry a doubling or tripling of the revenue share by customer, by introducing that type of technology. I am sure in the casino industry you can see similar results.
“It excites me, because there’s just a tremendous amount of untapped potential in the international casino markets. You have certain operators that really know what they are doing, but you have a lot of new casino owners around the world who are just discovering the business, and are bringing some of this retail-type experience into the management of their businesses.”
Clearly different territories and jurisdictions have different needs and have reached different stages in the theoretical journey towards casino management systems nirvana. Some markets lag behind in developments, like TITO, that others take for granted. But system capabilities that were once only cost-effective and accessible to the largest operators are now within the ROI reach of much smaller operators, and a host of new casino businesses catering for new markets continue to come into being. The potential and opportunity remains massive, both for operators and for vendors of casino management systems.
“The Las Vegas operators have had it down pat – you get a player card, and you play in any casino in Las Vegas and two months later you will get some mails from that casino that will invite you to stay in the hotel, come to the restaurant. They have been using that in Vegas for years. Other operators around the world are just starting to discover the power of that,” he says.
“Knowing what your customers are doing, how long they stayed at the hotel, what time of the year they come, the restaurants they like – all of those things allow you to do targeted marketing. Up to this point, it was a ‘throw a dart in the dark’ type of approach. Right now it is more of a pinpointed approach. Your best customers are getting another reward to keep them coming. You are meeting customers, you are trying to bring them to up a level. And you know who your occasional customers are and when they come in to the casino, what type of play they have. You can target those three different groups very differently, tailoring the marketing very closely to the behaviour of the recipient.”
But casino management is starting to move a long way beyond tracking ‘carded’ players and analyzing their behaviour after they have left the property in order to deliver more targeted marketing to entice them to return to the property. It’s moving towards real-time interaction with players, and the tailoring of individual experiences to individual players while they are actually on the gaming floor, or wherever they might be in the property. With a 360° view of customers, the potential for increasing revenues and maintaining an edge on competitors is much increased… particularly if that understanding and knowledge can be applied ‘live’, in the form of offers, rewards and incentives that are prompted by real time analysis and feedback.

Richer, more personalised
There was a time when ‘casino management’ might not have meant much more that slot accounting, and older, ‘legacy’ technologies hampered what was possible and justifiable in terms of return on investment. But technology marches on, becoming more powerful, more reliable – cheaper as well as faster. The scalability of modern computer hardware combined with the speed and capacity of modern networks is opening up new opportunities for providers of casino management systems. And with more sophisticated, in-game display facilities creating an interface that is richer than the old LCD displays, casino operators can deliver a richer, more personalized experience to players while they are on the floor, by opening a service window in a game and making and offer or providing a comp.
Progressives, jackpots, bonuses and a host of other promotional tools are now at the fingertips of the gaming floor operator and can be used to enhance players’ experiences and improve revenue. Soon, it will be possible to make offers to players pretty much wherever they are – seated at a slot, away from the gaming floor and off the property.
Take on board the vision shared by Microsoft and its many partners who are delivering CRM and Business Intelligence and other facility management services outside the casino industry, and you’ll accept that before long businesses will be communicating offers and incentives to customers via their own personal devices, such as mobile phones. Marketing offers will be made at times and in places and in contexts when they will be most attractive to customers, and most effective.
Technology is allowing the personal touch to come back, almost going full circle, as Herrera explains. “25 years ago the casino was a personalized experience, but only for the top players. It was really face-to-face, because as a casino operator, you didn’t have the modern technology to back you up.” Deploy technology appropriately and today this kind of personal relationship can be extended, cost-effectively, way beyond the VIPs and out to most – if not all – customers,
Casino management goes a long way beyond tracking cash and profits, managing the drop and keeping accounting and auditing records that will be acceptable to owners and regulators… that said, in larger operations there are just too many machines for the operator to drop the whole casino every day. Given that, in some jurisdictions, taxes have to be paid according to day-to-day revenue,  tracking the drop and currency into the floor is vitally important.

Beyond slots
Server-based or server-assisted gaming, like casino management in general terms has been taken to refer primarily to slot machines. Whether through proprietary or open network systems, it has been comparatively straightforward to gather information from an array of meters inside individual slots, and in more recent devices, from a Windows computer in the cabinet, perhaps running CE. Table games, until the advent of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), were not so easy to integrate into a networked floor.
Progressive Gaming’s Casinolink suite, which began life over ten years ago, can use RFID to add major CRM functionality to table games, as the company’s Director of Sales EMEA, Tim Parker explains.
“What we are effectively doing with RFID,” he says, “is turning the table game into a slot machine to all intents and purposes. Casinolink allows the operator to get information about what’s going on in real time, what’s going on on the slot machines, how much it’s being played, how much it’s won, lost and so on, and who has played on that machine and how much they’ve played or won or lost. It’s very easy to gather this information from slots, because they’re electronic entities. Using RFID and table-based software systems, we can do the same sort of thing for a table as we can for a slot.”
Alert fields can be set within the system to flag up events and alert management, perhaps when a player has a win more than $1000, when one of the tables loses more than $5000… or whatever. This information, delivered in real time, can help the operator manage the profitability of the floor and feed the relevant information to inspectors and dealers.

Away from the gaming floor
According to IGT’s Steve Miller, for a lot of operators the revenue earned away from the gaming floor is becoming more important. “In the 1980s, 80 per cent of revenue came from gaming operations,” he says.  “In the 1990s it went down to around 65-70 per cent of the revenue from gaming, and today, if you look at the resorts on the Las Vegas Strip, half of the revenue comes from gaming, and the other half is non-gaming activity, be it restaurants, spas, golf course.”
IGT’s Advantage system includes Mariposa that can link it to the different backend systems that run food and beverage, retail, spa, hotel and other elements of a resort casino, and can gather data alongside data from the casino operation. Tying the whole facility together in this way allows all aspects of the property to be managed as a gaming and resort complex.
“We have customers right now who have an Advantage Mariposa system and it communicates with their point of sale and hotel management systems, their resort and golf course,” he says. “We do communicate right now – it all goes in to the Mariposa system.”
The next phase, after integrating management systems with all services provided on a property, is to go real time – and with Advantage and Mariposa, IGT expects to be there within 18 months. “We have six trial sites right now where we are testing the connectivities and the functionality and the impact and making sure that both from an operational standpoint and from a technology standpoint that we have covered our bases,” Miller says.
“As we go forward the ability to tie your casino management system, your server-based gaming system into all this in a real-time environment will become a reality. If I have a player that is playing on the floor, I can look at my hotel management system and I can make an offer to that player for a hotel room at that point in time because those systems will be communicating in a real-time environment.”
Systems specialists Progressive Gaming agree; capturing data from multiple areas of a casino has become key to an operation's success. Combining that data with gaming floor data through a business intelligence solution such as Casinolink Analytics provides the operator with a real-time, all-round view they need in order to stay competitive.
Other vendors prefer to concentrate on their core speciality, managing the gaming floor, and provide ‘hooks’ to share data between their system and those of other CRM applications. While some, such as Atronic, which is behind Galaxis, recognise that resort activities are becoming increasingly important for their customers and provide off-gaming-floor functionality, but retain a focus on “traditional” casinos, which are not resorts but just operate a bar and restaurant.

Going real-time
Customer relationship management, business intelligence, player tracking and data mining techniques combined with back office accounting and auditing functions, perhaps seasoned with a level of patron management while customers are on the property, is what lies at the heart of most of today’s casino management systems.
Some systems, like Bally’s Windows-based Open Casino Manager, are well suited to smaller casinos, typically with fewer than 1,000 machines. Modern technology has the potential to move all these activities into real-time, according to IGT’s Steve Miller, the company’s Advantage product line director.
“Going in to the future, what we are doing is taking the legacy system of today and really taking that functionality and putting it on to the network,” he says.
“All the casino systems that are out there today run on a pretty archaic network infrastructure, including our own. They run on older technology. We are taking the power of the network and the power of technology and the speed of the network and are going to bring that to the casino floor so you have faster delivery times and more marketing capabilities to your end user while they are in the casino itself.”
“If you look at casinos today, it is easier to market to your patron when they are not on your casino floor. You can send them email, a regular snail mail at home, with a coupon, or an offer to come back into the casino, but once they come in to the floor and they are in your facility, it is almost harder to track them down unless you physically walk out on to the floor and connect with them.”
“It is easier to connect with them once they leave the building. By bringing the power of the network and putting our system and the functionality is has onto the network, and utilizing more of a web-based service, you will be able to interact with your players real-time, based on what they are doing and how they are doing. It will bring more power to the floor for the operator.”
Tracking what customers do on the floor so you can market to them more effectively, either in real-time as they play, or to entice them to return to the property, is one major component of casino management. The ability to manage activities on the gaming floor in an integrated way including tables, slots and cash – and including the game content of slots, and the ability to make promotional gaming offers such as progressives – requires a networked environment. Server-based gaming, supported by back office accounting and auditing, allows a casino operator not only to look at what customers are doing on the floor, but also adjust the machine make-up to suit the needs of the patrons.
The power of a server-based environment can be used from the machine side to increase revenue from a floor if real-time information on the players who are on the floor can be used to add more benefit to the player’s experience while they are on the property. Technology can bring the revenue-enhancing benefits of the casino host to most if not all the players on the floor – and can help a limited team of human hosts target their efforts more effectively.
A typical casino floor on Saturday night in Vegas, according to Miller, might have a 50-50 mix of carded and uncarded players, and a team of casino hosts who walk the floor, engaging with uncarded players and trying to get them into the casino’s marketing programme by issuing a temporary card. If the casino management system in use can run its analytics in real-time, then it generates information that can be used to target the effort of human hosts. As Miller explains: “As a casino operator, if I have a small staff of casino hosts, I am better equipped to target people that I want to first, be it good or bad, and I can monitor the whole floor, real-time, and monitor all the action that is going on as opposed to waiting until the next day.”
Casino management information provided in real time, during play, makes a major difference, as compared to analyzing data the following day, Miller says: “It changes the landscape and the complexity of casino marketing. Today, you do everything after the fact; take that resource and time and energy, and put it in a real-time environment. Then add the power of the server-based system, the power of an internet or web-based methodology, and it just opens up the whole door. It is only limited by the potential of what you want to do with it.”
Progressive Gaming’s Tim Parker agrees: “When you move away from listing reports, you no longer have to say ‘right let’s see what happened yesterday’ and produce a long list of reports with lots and lots of figures on them. You can start using real time business intelligence or analytics, which allows you to drill down and have many, many different views of data – which is being updated in real-time, if that’s the way you want to work. Operators can react to situations far more quickly. As the market gets more and more competitive, these are the tools that give the operators an edge.”

Beyond marketing – into ethics
As Atronic points out, real-time casino management systems have benefits that go beyond maximizing revenue. In order to be effective, responsible gaming initiatives need to be implemented on the gaming floor with real-time tracking facilities.
“From an ethical point of view,” the company argues, “player tracking has to stop where an individual’s freedom starts. It has to be done with the player’s full acceptance and awareness. As long as players have to explicitly identify themselves in order to participate in the loyalty programme, which is the case with our systems, tracking is done always with their agreement.”
That said, tracking players for responsible gaming purposes may involve tracking activities without players’ explicit permission, and there is room for further work on the development to regulations and policies in this area, according to Atronic.. “Responsible Gaming policies and actions should be communicated up-front to the players by the casino operators,” the company asserts.

Solutions on offer
Different territories, different jurisdictions and the wide variety of casino operations in terms of size and scale of operations and approach to the business mean there isn’t going to be a ‘one size fits all’ solution to casino management solutions. Ten years ago, according to Progressive Gaming’s Tim Parker, suppliers generally provided a single solution on the basis of ‘here’s a system, use that or use nothing’. Most of today’s casino management solutions are modular, and allow the operator to select a set of facilities that best match specific needs. “The solutions that we put together, because they’re so interoperable, it means that the operators can pick and choose a solution that’s relevant to them in consultation with us,” Parker explains. “They end up with a close fit to what they want. I think that’s a very big difference between systems these days and what went on maybe even four or five years ago."
What separates Progressive from its competitors, according to Parker, is the fact that casino management systems is all that it does – the company is not involved in supplying or maintaining any other products or services to the casino industry. “We have a product that runs a casino and is the backbone of a casino, and that’s it… so we have to make sure that our products are as good as they can be, and better than the rest. We concentrate on the area which we understand, which is the gaming floor, an the collation of information about the gaming floor itself and about players. We concentrate on what we’re very good at, and try not to be ‘all things to all men’, because in our experience, that’s where you can fall foul.”
Octavian’s ACP system, Accounting, Control and Progressives, like Progressive Gaming’s Casinolink system, started life around ten years ago. ACP was launched to allow operators to link slot machines into an efficient local or wide area network, controlled centrally on a PC at the local gaming venue or remotely via a web interface. Octavian operates a central data centre that currently runs almost 18,000 machines – the largest independent network of gaming machines in the world, effectively providing a bureau management system for operators. Other versions of ACP allow operators to run their own machines, either within a single location, or across multiple sites in the same company.
ACP has recently gained GLI certification, and has recently been integrated with Octavian GateManager and Octavian CashManager. “ACP allows you to run electronic gaming machines – there isn’t functionality for tables, it’s purely for slot machines. That’s where Octavian CashManager and Octavian GateManager come in – they handle the table management, and ‘front desk’ reporting, administration, security and surveillance.” according to Andy Simms, who responsible for the company’s technical sales support.
Octavian GateManager and Octavian CashManager link to ACP and add player tracking and ‘front desk’ functions and cash management facilities.
Octavian CashManager deals with the cage and tables on the casino floor, providing the kind of accounting facilities for table games that is offered by ACP for slots, alongside actual and theoretical values for each table and customer across the floor. “It handles front window, chip bank, main banks, soft and hard counts, and then on the tables you have the accounting functions – player estimates and player tracking. You can monitor things like table fills, transferring cash or chips to the chip bank, you can do closing float balances, actual win/loss, drop reporting and so on,” Simms explains.
“Octavian GateManager deals with check ins and check outs, ticketing, surveillance, tracking information and has a marketing function that helps target mailshots and promotions to groups of people, and allows you to change promotions on the fly as you monitor the response they generate. It collects data, but you can’t make offers direct to players while they play,” he says.

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