Imagine acquiring 11 different casinos recently, but each has a different set of systems from multiple vendors collecting data from slots machines, cash registers, hotel desks, and showrooms. How can you unify these products, so your marketing team can successfully use that disparate data to please customers? That was a challenge facing Bally’s Corporation.
And it was the main topics of a panel at G2E on Tuesday entitled: “Optimizing the Operator View: Unifying Patron Value across Gaming Systems.”
Two of the three panelists were Sina Miri and Robert Valvo, both IT executives with Bally’s Corporation. Valvo said, “For the last couple of years, we’ve tried to manage external barriers, vendor-side barriers, even internal barriers. These silos are typically managed by different leaders within the company. So gaining access to some of those systems may not be as straightforward as you think at the onset and these are just some of the challenges.”
Miri noted that sometimes system providers aren’t as willing to cooperate and share with their own clients. He recommended that clients “make it very clear (to vendors) that if we don’t get access to our data, if you make us jump through hoops or it has to come to threats before we get access to it, we’ll go a different route. Again, it’s about finding the right partner that will actually give you the tools you need.”
From a different perspective, Erica Ferris, director of casino marketing at Monarch in Blackhawk, Colorado, said, “All these separate systems contain very important guest-based data. And as marketing advances and we want to reward players in a really smart and intelligent way, you have to find a way to consolidate all that information into a single system.”
Panel moderator Vicki Griffin, a VP at Everi Holdings, set the stage and added the complexity of mixing brick-and-mortar casinos with online and social platforms, saying, “We all talk about that dream of omnichannel marketing and communications and having to pull out your video platform and get a 360-degree view of your customer, so you can really understand who they are and better serve them.”
Miri concluded on an optimistic note, saying that some great advances today bode well for the future. “Using the data that’s available to you in this day and age, it’s not rocket science to get access in real time and say, ‘I can calculate the return right now, not based on the last calculation that may have been six months ago.’ Whatever you’re counting from the customer at that point, whatever offer you’re giving them, it should be about right now. Not from many many months ago. It’s shortchanging the other customers that are worth more to you.”
He went on to say, “We should be looking at technologies that actually enable this. Everything else, you should literally plan on sunsetting them as quickly as possible. I’m looking forward at G2E to see who’s really talking about delivering that real-time calculation.”
