Joe Witterschein was working in Atlantic City decades ago when his casino’s marketing department sought a volunteer to do customer research.
“My boss said whoever wants to do it, step forward. Everybody else took a step back and I was left standing there,” said Witterschein, currently president of the Tribal Gaming Services & Advisory Group. “True story.”
During the recent Indian Gaming Association Tradeshow & Conference session “Player Perceptions – How Customer Research Can Improve Your Operations,” Witterschein noted that most of his research now involves qualitative research for focus groups, what he calls “the voice of the customer.”
“I think what happens in the gaming industry, more so than a lot of other industries, is you bring in very talented casino management, marketing people, hotel, all the different disciplines, and people tend to bring with them those things, those strategies, those tactics, that work somewhere else,” Witterschein said.
“But no one bothered to ask the customer if that thing that used to work in California will that work in south Florida. Whatever you did in Buffalo, does that work in Oklahoma City? You spend a lot of money and you find out it doesn’t work — because no one bothered to ask the customer if they care.”
The panel, moderated by Gene Johnson, executive vice president of Victor Strategies, indicated that qualitative research, asking customers what they want, is the best way to discern what a casino should provide. That compares to quantitative research, which deals mostly with numerical values.
Julia Carcamo, president & chief brand strategist for J. Carcamo & Associates, said qualitative research helped one property she worked with reveal that customers wanted a coffee shop where they could get breakfast, lunch, and dinner, rather than a steakhouse.
“When you ask a customer something, especially in a quantitative aspect, they sort of answer the way they think they should answer,” Carcamo said. “But when you do qualitative, it may start like that, but a good moderator thinks, ‘Wait minute, let me dig into this a little.’”
“If you’re doing a survey, you have to ask the right questions,” Johnson noted. “Often, you’ll do qualitative as a front end to make sure you’re asking the right questions, because you get a much deeper conversation with the customer to understand.”
Shank Marketing Founder and CEO Justin Shank said qualitative market research can result in change. At one casino he worked with, a bus stop was installed nearby. But unintended consequences included the bus stop becoming a hangout for vagrants and other undesirable types. Comments cards and online reviews indicated customers were not pleased with the situation.
“We sent out some surveys. We did some other things with their players to ask what they are really thinking,” Shank said. “Is it just a small subset of the comments that we’re hearing or seeing? But after the surveys came back, the (casino) made a concerted effort based on those results to enhance their security, to make security more visible, and they saw a really big change.”
