The expansion of AI within the player development divisions of casino operations has wielded a profound impact on the roles of hosts, whose specialty profession requires a high degree of interpersonal skills combined with marketing strategies and disciplines designed to grow and cultivate the prized VIP player component.
Just when AI was being looked upon as a threat to the extent it would make casino hosts an “endangered species,” along comes a new AI-native Premium Player Development Platform designed not to eliminate the position but to enhance the value of a good host by giving them time to use their expertise up close and personal.
The platform is the creation of Tier I gaming and technology executives Tal Rubinstein, Mikhail Gaushkin, and Michael Lissauer, who joined forces to found Hey Seven and unify three signals that were never brought together before – gaming, behavioral, and conversational intelligence – to hyper-personalize player development at scale.
“A great host is an art,” said Rubinstein, who is Hey Seven’s CEO. “I saw that during my years of Tier I operator experience. “But the art is not sitting behind a desk and doing coordination 85 percent of the time. The art is the human interaction moments.
“Hosts currently have assistance to help them do their jobs, but nothing, until now, that augments them at scale. Hey Seven enables hosts to have superhuman capabilities and manage hyper-personalized relationships with players.”
Gaushkin, Hey Seven’s Chief Commercial and Revenue Officer, echoed Rubinstein’s observations during his own Tier I operator experience supervising player development executives.
“I watched them come to work first thing in the morning and literally have hundreds of emails from the players assigned to them,” Gaushkin recalled. “They would spend the next five to six hours working with front-desk coordinators on a variety of operations throughout the company, trying to take care of their players and replying to them one by one.”
Gaushkin said that Hey Seven can help hosts manage administrative tasks such as bookings and working with the hotel and restaurant reservation system to check for availability.
“This enables player development executives to truly enhance their art by devoting more time to speaking with their customers when they are on the casino floor and having the opportunity to cultivate future customers and a variety of other human interactions that no platform will ever be able to replace.”
Observing that the players themselves expect resource engagement and services on a greater scale, Gaushkin acknowledged that in many other industries consumers are already receiving that elevated treatment.
“The gaming industry needs to catch up,” he continued. “Hey Seven has created an entirely new category of player development technology designed to grow revenues and at the same time give hosts the freedom to interact personally.”
Gaushkin said that a casino host can have anywhere from 400-plus customers coded to them, some in the thousands, and that it is humanly impossible to provide services at the right time and make the right offer.
Hey Seven paves the way for player development divisions to not only interact with guests who are already identified as premium players – there is also the potential for a guest who has not yet quite reached the level to become a VIP.
“Being able to identify future guests earlier by understanding their behavior and understanding the questions that they ask can be invaluable for hosts to guide them through their journeys to attain the next level,” Gaushkin explained.
Rubinstein takes it a step farther by reinforcing the fact that Hey Seven does hyper-personalization at scale and is never off shift.
“When you are never off shift and you have a hyper-personalized relationship with a guest, making an offer available at the right time and at the right moment is important,” she said. “I will know if a customer reads texts or interacts with me in the mornings on weekends and in the evening on weekdays. Timing is personalized to determine intent, motivation, and incentive.”
She continued by explaining human interaction revolves around three triggers – Crisis, Opportunity, and anything outside of the guard rails.
“When there is a crisis, Hey Seven will alert,” Rubinstein explained. “Humans – the executives, host managers, the hosts – have a console. It is mobile friendly. It alerts them when Hey Seven requires a human to intervene.
“Opportunities are present all the time. When you are there 24/7 and always on shift, Hey Seven makes it possible to recognize them. The opportunities are surfaced to a human in the loop. Also, anything outside the guard rails. Our architecture is built in such a way that you cannot ‘jail break’ our agents.”
Gaushkin’s experience in Tier I gave him a vast insight into understanding the analytics and sophisticated solutions that were available. His observations showed him that the wide variety of data generated was missing what he calls the “EQ,” the human element.
“It has a lot of IQ, such as knowing the date you gambled and how much,” he said. “A lot of statistics that are meaningful but at the same time knowing there can be multiple players that have similar statistics on those systems.
“How a guest feels about what they did, their feelings about games, and certain events that took place when they visited. The human mind can only intake anywhere from 100 to 150 relationships and incorporate that detail. Our system tracks all the data and combines it with gaming intelligence, behavioral intelligence, and conversational intelligence.
“Our data creates the layer that assists in taking care of the customer at the greater level. It runs 24/7 in the guest’s preferred language and learns from every customer interaction. Our goal is not to replace casino hosts. Our goal is to give every premium customer host-level attention while allowing humans to focus on really, truly building deep relationships.”
