Focus on CasinoTrac: RePrint Enroll kiosks save loyal customers from waiting in line

Tuesday, September 5, 2023 8:00 AM
  • John G. Brokopp, CDC Gaming

As long as there are player’s cards, there are going to be impatient casino guests waiting in line to enroll in the club or request a replacement card.

Lines are most likely to form during peak periods of operation, a frustrating situation for property executives, but more so for the anxious folks eager to play their favorite slots and table games.

It doesn’t have to be that way now that CasinoTrac has come to the rescue with RePrint Enroll, user-friendly kiosk technology that enables casino guests to self-serve the reprinting of their tiered, branded loyalty card or enroll in the program.

“This product was primarily the result of customer feedback,” said Jeff Baldi, senior vice-president of commercial strategy for CasinoTrac. “We discovered across our customer base of 300 casinos that there was a significant demand for functionality like this.

“We stand by our principle to bring as much value as we can to our customers. We decided now was the right time, because everybody is still trying to do more with less and be accountable to the bottom line.”

The development of RePrint Enroll is a joint venture between CasinoTrac and Centennial Gaming Systems. The technology will be valuable not only to operators using CasinoTrac CMS but those using other CMS solutions as well.

The joint venture delivers a DNA-level integration of CMS-agnostic loyalty services and industry-leading innovation of the KioskTrac platform.

Baldi said that RePrint Enroll is the product of implementing some third-party hardware, adding “really the whole project is the integration of two software solutions; a hardware kiosk enclosure and a device that will read or scan 2-D barcodes, drivers licenses, passports, and so on. These pieces coalesce with a regulatory-compliant services that validates the authenticity of the ID and KYC requirements”.

Recognizing that a great majority of the work done at the player’s club every day is looking up player accounts, checking to see if a guest is enrolled, issuing replacement cards and signing up new members, Baldi said that RePrint Enroll is the ideal solution for eliminating menial tasks that can tie up the human resources division of a casino operation.

“It is one of the tasks that can easily be handled by a machine,” he said. “We learned from integration that we can use trusted solutions to abide by regulatory standards and have no concern about the creation of illegal accounts. These staff members can then be focused on the most critical facet of every casino business, the customer experience. Re-focusing energy on delivering great customer service instead of transactions and tasks continues to be a great investment.”

“This self-service process will take approximately one minute, as opposed to the three to five minutes it would take for a transaction between a guest and player’s club representative,” Baldi reasoned. “We find at least a 60 percent saving of time is a good benchmark.”

CasinoTrac has designed two versions of RePrint Enroll kiosks: One solution in which there is a single card printer hopper that would create cards on generic cards stock, a second upgraded version of the device equipped with four card hoppers to accommodate tier-level cards and print out the appropriate one, or simply to add more capacity.

“The number of RePrint Enroll kiosks a property will require is driven by need and the size of the operation,” Baldi noted. “I imagine operators may opt to kind of ‘tip-toe’ into the market, do their math based upon their specific operation, and create a long-term solution that eventually matures to a cardless loyalty solution.  Running the numbers leads to substantial savings and efficiency.”

Deployment of the technology will of course depend on the jurisdiction. Baldi anticipates having to work with regulators in certain markets about unattended account creation and card re-printing, but revealed “we are definitely pointing toward having product submissions and the prototype in booth #1636 at G2E”.

RePrint Enroll is trail blazer innovation that fills the role of a perfect bridge between player cards as they exist now and how loyalty programs will be administered in the not-so-distant future based upon the rapid development and sophistication of technology and its expanding applications.

“We’re definitely very excited about it for a couple of reasons,” Baldi said. “Number one, it is a casino management agnostic solution, meaning that every casino is capable of using our solution. It doesn’t have to be one of the 300 CasinoTrac CMS solutions that are in the field.

“We can put this on top of any CMS platform. Additionally, it is a really good intermediate step toward a cardless environment as we continue to break down lines at and bring down the expense of the traditional player’s club booth.

“We are at the forefront of advancement as the industry transitions toward a mobile-first cardless environment which CasinoTrac is already capable of through our KTMobile app.”

Casino Trac’s RePrint Enroll is the immediate answer to sending casino guests to the slots and tables in seconds rather than wasting their time and the time of the operators standing in line for a card.

“We’re just trying to make it easy to get there, and be the leader of these changes in the business as we move forward,” Baldi said.

John G. Brokopp is a veteran of 50 years of professional journalist experience in the horse racing and gaming industries