David Farahi loved the Quick Custom Intelligence tools so much as a client when he was COO of Monarch Casino & Resort that when he left the company in September, he became a QCI investor and now has a seat on their advisory board.
The QCI Platform aligns player development, marketing and gaming with what the company calls powerful real-time operational tools developed for the gaming industry. All QCI products are built on the QCI Platform, a hybrid or cloud-based technology that enables fully coordinated activities across a gaming enterprise.
Farahi has known QCI co-founders Ralph Thomas and Andrew Cardno for more than a decade and reveals that he had a fabulous time as a client collaborating with Cardno on developing new ways to understand the tremendous amount of slot data that’s available to operators and allows them to improve their slot floor and player experience.
“I did that as an operator and client of Ralph and Andrew for over a decade and when I stepped away from gaming operations, those guys reached out to me and said are you are interested in joining us,” Farahi recalled. “I jumped at the opportunity because I have such tremendous respect for Andrew and Ralph. They’re both geniuses, and the opportunity to work with such tremendous thought leaders has been a ton of fun.”
Monarch started using the latest QCI iteration about a year ago, and it had an immediate impact for the host team.
“It’s a powerful tool for the host team and nothing like it exists in the industry in terms of its real-time capability of telling you how your hosts are doing and activating them to drive new business,” Farahi said. “It’s head-and-shoulders above the anything else in terms of the quality of the product.”
The QCI Core platform has three tools – Slots, Host and Marketing.
“When they told me they were collaborating to build a new tool, I was rooting for them,” he shared. “I was in a position I wanted to see the goods. I couldn’t just install it off their reputation. I waited until the product was functional and had done a couple of installs before they came to Monarch.”
Those operators raved about the tools, and when Monarch installed the host tool, the “impact was immediate.”.
“It does two things for a casino operations team,” said Farahi. “It allows you to very clearly show the carrot to the host and also gives you more tools so the host, if they’re entrepreneurial, can drive their own business. A lot of casinos have bonus programs for their hosts, but a lot times they can’t show the host how they are performing towards that goal in real time.”
The first thing the host wants to see when they arrive at work and when they leave is their progress in real time, he said. It allows them to segment their own database and go after new opportunities.
“In lot of casinos, the host has no ability to segment and research their database, or they have to call a different department and ask for a list of their guests that haven’t been here in a year and live within X miles,” explained Farahi. “With the QCI host tool they can do all of that themselves. They don’t need anybody else. The tool is so intuitive that they can say, ‘I want know everyone’s birthday next month who I haven’t seen in three months so I can send them an invitation.’ The VIP manager can also create a program and push the task to all of the hosts and be able to track what they are doing.”
“What differentiates it from other tools on the market is the same way QCI does in every one of its products – the back-end database,” Farahi noted.
“The hardest part of the whole system is building a data warehouse that is robust, accurate and in real time, and that’s what makes the difference,” he said. “It doesn’t sound like a hard problem to solve, but it’s a tremendously hard problem to solve because casinos have so much data coming from so many different places in so many different ways. It’s hard to conduct the data sewage work to create a robust real-time data warehouse. Once completed, then QCI builds these tools on top of it – the Slot tool, Host tool and Marketing tool. It’s really the cutting-edge data warehouse that allows the other tools to be so powerful.”
Farahi invested in QCI because he knows the talent behind it, including other members of the team. He also knows how powerful the product is. “It was a no-brainer for me to join this team,” he said. “I officially have a seat on their advisory board, but I have been having so much fun with the team that I’m leaning in a lot more than a traditional board member in helping with different parts of the business. It’s been a blast.”
Farahi said the business has grown faster than anyone has imagined during the last two years. QCI is seen “as the cutting-edge in gaming analytics.” The next project the team is working on is a Loyalty tool, something that’s difficult to deploy.
“The architecture and hardware are pretty extensive,” he said. “You have to have a box in the slot and a computer to run the card reader and screen at each slot machine. What QCI has done is simplify that entire architecture by creating a loyalty system that doesn’t use cards. It just uses QR codes. The system is now live in Georgia across many locations and slot machines, and it’s working. You get the same benefits without all of the costs. It’s showing results and promise.”
Farahi said they’re looking for other non-traditional distributive gaming operators who currently don’t have a loyalty system and would like one. He suggests that those operators probably didn’t do it in the past because it was too expensive to deploy. “We have created a solution that is much less expensive to deploy and gets all of the benefits,” he said.
The QCI platform is providing analytics for more than 100,000 devices, gaming machines and over 3,000 sites around the world. He called it a mature product despite it being only two years old.
“We are in very large resorts in America to small slot clubs in Australia,” Farahi reported. “That’s one of the powerful points about the tool, that it can be used for large or small operations. It was built to be flexible.”
That means large, small, tribal, commercial, enterprise and standalone properties.
“I was in gaming operations for 14-plus years,” he said. “We have been using gaming analytics tools for more than a decade. A decade ago, there weren’t a lot of operators that understood the need for the power of a gaming analytics tool like QCI has built. That has frankly changed as the industry has matured. Supply has exceeded demand across the country, and operators have to be smarter, be more efficient and improve the quality of their experience. To do that, you need data tools, and nobody has built a data tool and has the experience and maturity that QCI has in building a tool that helps operators fulfil their brand promise.”
