The first thing many patrons do when entering a casino is stop by loyalty kiosks to see if there are bonuses or offers available. They swipe a player’s card, enter a password, and are able to see and use offers ranging from free slot play to meal and hotel discounts.
When CasinoTrac started providing loyalty kiosks for the gaming industry in 1997, its products and the offers for players were a bit more “rudimentary,” according to President and CEO Chad Hoehne.
Flash forward 26 years, and CasinoTrac’s loyalty solution is light years advanced from previous incarnations.
“Over the years, it has developed into something that we’re particularly proud of and pleased about how we’ve advanced the interaction and the engagement with the customer on the player loyalty kiosks,” Hoehne says. “Colors and graphics and the richness of the experience have expanded dramatically.”
Kiosks that were once two dimensional are now richly hued and three dimensional, “much in the manner of how slot machines have advanced over that same period of time,” Hoehne adds.
While those features are specific to customer experiences, what sets KioskTrac apart for operators is its ability to integrate all aspects of an operators’ casino management system.
“Because it’s integrated with the CMS players club, it provides a one-stop setup for all of the different offers, rewards, balances, and electronic drawing barrels for customers in one place,” Hoehne says. “Where certain promotions and offers might be run on the CMS system and others run on the kiosk system in a more traditional setup, everything is central and is the same at players club and on the KioskTrac.”
There are numerous features incorporated into KioskTrac, ranging from the ability to harvest player information for enhanced marketing opportunities to creating daily promotions for qualified players based on specific, operator controlled criteria.
Many of KioskTrac’s newest features were spurred by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need for operators to provide customers with enhanced safety features. Hoehne notes that CasinoTrac helped operators develop various protocols for re-opening, including a dynamic social distancing product that automatically enabled the disengagement of adjacent games next to machines a customer was playing. This product also enabled, and still helps, staff clean machines once a player moves on.
One byproduct of CasinoTrac products developed during the pandemic was more of an emphasis on cashless payment systems.
“People wanted to have less touchpoints with equipment in the casino,” Hoehne says. “I think that’s waned a lot now. But the residual from that is that we developed the mobile players club, basically, and the mobile ability to interact with the slot machine on your phone, to download credits on and off the games, or to use your phone as a virtual card.”
While it’s optimal for KioskTrac to be used with CasinoTrac’s CMS system, it also works as a stand-alone product.
“It can provide player loyalty functionality on casino properties that use other casino management systems as their primary CMS,” Hoehne says, noting that several KioskTrac installations currently exist with other brand CMS systems across the country.
