It’s no secret that there’s big bucks in retaining customers in the casino industry. The loyalists and stalwarts — the repeat visitors, if you will — are the customers that operators want to see again and again. These are the customers who bring the greatest amount of value to the business overall.
Put differently, they are the customers that keep the operation humming.
Ensuring that these customers keep coming back is harder than it seems. What’s more, identifying when they’ve “churned,” when they’ve had enough and moved on to another casino, can be difficult.
Software tools from a company named Gaming Analytics can help. The company specializes in data analysis and predictive analytics, in reading data from disparate systems to get a pulse on the overall health of the business. This process is incredibly useful for casinos trying to minimize churn rates and maximize profit.
Gaming Analytics will be on hand this week at the Global Gaming Expo 2019 in Las Vegas.
The company’s model is simple — Gaming Analytics leverages a proprietary churn-detection algorithm that has become part of its standard tool. Over the last few years, this algorithm has proven to help operators identify player churn 400 percent faster than average. Once the technology identifies players at risk of churning, it triggers a series of protocols designed to retain customers before they go. The goal: To avoid churn all together.
For Gaming Analytics, churn-detection is based almost entirely on customer visits. Charting this data from a customer’s players card, the system establishes visitation patterns and red-flag customers when behaviors deviate from the norms.
Once these players have been flagged, the system initiates direct contact invitations to return, proactively suggesting can’t-miss promotions to entice churned players back into the fold.
According to Gaming Analytics CEO and co-founder Kiran Brahmandam, behavior patterns of individual churning players may seem erratic, but at a macro level they begin to make sense. This is why strategic marketers use churn rate to measure the efficacy of retention campaigns. It’s also why churn rate can be such a powerful metric for casino operators looking to maximize revenue.
“Your player churn rate takes the aggregate of all those individual player decisions and illuminates the commonalities between them,” Brahmandam says. “Armed with this metric you can now drill down to the individual player level and make strategic decisions to retain an individual or a segment of players.”
Put differently, casino executives consider churn-detection and retention as evasive actions for keeping those customers who might otherwise think about heading somewhere else. And they work.
Why is retention so important? Several reasons. For starters, loyal customers usually are good ones—people who come often, play regular bankrolls, and spend money on food and beverage all the while. Second, keeping old customers provides a healthy return on investment, since it costs money to acquire customers in the first place. Finally, the more customers an operator can have over the long haul, the better.
By enabling operators to hold on to more customers longer, Gaming Analytics makes it easy for casinos to get the most out of their data.
