For land-based casinos, especially competing in a market as competitive as Florida, personal, real-time engagement with customers is even more important.
Jay Dorris, CEO of Wind Creek Hospitality (WCH), owned by Poarch Creek Band of Indians, knows this all too well. WCH is a major international gaming operator, with locations in Alabama, Florida, Pennsylvania, Aruba and Curacao. A brand-new facility – Wind Creek Chicago Southland – will open this fall.
“Players are always looking to where they can have the most fun, and have the best chance of winning,” he said.
Casino gaming floors continue to stagnate with 20+ year old systems technologies. Last year, WCH purchased the Magic City property in Miami and earlier this year installed Acres Manufacturing Company’s Foundation technology platform and Foundation HQ casino management system to help the casino maximize marketing efficiency by personalizing offers for each player.
The industry’s lack of modernization at large is costing it billions of dollars in lost revenues, according to an Acres’ statement. The Foundation technology is a modern architecture and is constructed to operate faster with more security for players funds, with a more intuitive player experience.
According to Dorris, so far, it’s been a game changer. The Foundation system was installed because it provided a hardware solution to a challenge they could not overcome at the Miami property – how do they get the SAS (Slot Accounting System, the communication protocol for slot machines) feed/data out of each individual games on the floor?
“Foundation is new, but they provide us a means to get a hold of that signal, and we’re able to monitor what our players are doing in real time,” he said. “We use the Foundation system to feed a player database that we built functioning in real time and with a lot more granularity of what’s going on with that player at a particular game on floor. We’re also able to pull in data feeds from the other transactional systems that might exist on the property, and it helps us to knit together a very comprehensive view of what a player is doing while they’re in one of our properties.”
WCH has also spent a lot of resources in building a virtual gaming space (with a big social component) so players can engage with them when they are not physically on a property. On any given day WCH sees over 100,000 visitors to the virtual properties.
From what the Foundation platform provides, that’s where the rubber really hits the road – “Express Offers”, a player loyalty/rewards system, using machine learning algorithms to help them understand each individual customer and what might be pertinent to them.
“We no longer do an offer to a segment,” Dorris said. “We try to make an offer to an individual. Our marketing programs have been able to evolve to a significant degree with these technologies.”
The objective is pretty simple: WCH wants to engage with their customers whenever or wherever they want to engage with them. The more they engage, the more incentive WCH can provide them to come back and visit their bricks and mortar property.
“It’s a continuous engagement cycle, a continuous engagement loop,” working in the virtual space as well, he added.
Data scientists, programmers and developers are employed to help build the algorithms to make sure they are giving offers that are relevant to an individual.
Dorris said as the Foundation system matures at Magic City, they will look at expanding the system to other WCH properties.
“In terms of efficiency, we see significant redemption of our offers (90 per cent redemption rate), over and above redemptions we got when we were doing a monthly direct mail program, for example,” he said. “That’s a significant improvement – two and a half, three times.”
Capturing players through these engagement efforts means more players are coming back to Magic City, as opposed to competitor properties.
“There’s a very significant correlation between the level of engagement we have with them and the number of visits they make to the property,” Dorris said. “Give them something they find fun to do. When it comes time to pick a place to go visit, I think we have a leg up.
“Acres has perfected that technology, the hardware, and they were very well advanced on the software side also and provided a shortcut for us to be able to get to market in Miami quicker with how we wanted to approach player loyalty. It was just a very good fit.”
