Casinos need to do a better job of using cashless gaming and other technology to better serve customers and bring in a younger and larger clientele.
The Indian Gaming Tradeshow & Convention kicked off its educational sessions Tuesday, with one eyeing trends people will see in 2023 and beyond to help the gaming industry.
“When I think about where we want to go in our industry, it’s important to take stock in where we are and compare ourselves to other industries,” said Steve Neely, general manager of the Rolling Hills Casino in northern California.
“When you think about contactless payments and overall player experience, how do casinos compare to other experiences? I’ve been going to Starbucks for years and don’t remember the last time I paid using money. Yet if I go to a casino today, the first thing I have to do is find an ATM – one that’s working – and take all of that money, play it, and hopefully have something left. Then I get a ticket and find a redemption station to get my money back.”
Casinos have been slow to adopt cashless gaming and customers have been slow to adopt it when it’s introduced.
Lindsay Slader, managing director of GeoComply, noted a big gap between casinos and the rest of commerce. “It almost seems ridiculous, because the industry isn’t at a point where people can easily access the products they want to play on inside the walls of the casino.”
Jon Wolfe, president, global gaming systems and services at Light & Wonder, compared the experience outside of gaming to the early adoption inside the industry and said it’s “lagging. We haven’t had a tipping point or moment technologically that’s a seamless automatic experience in gaming. When we solve that, the tipping point will get hit and somebody will have to step out in a lighthouse type of experience and refine this and get it right for everybody to fall in line behind.”
One issue is that payment providers don’t own the entire experience end to end. Someone has to pick that up and carry the ball forward, Wolfe said.
“The experience has to come along quite a bit more before it’s automatic and seamless,” Wolfe said.
Joe Asher, president of sports betting for IGT, said part of the challenge with technology revolves around responsible gambling. Sometimes there’s a benefit to “having friction” in the process as a check for people. He said that when he funds a sports-betting account, he uses only cash for that reason.
“The reality that the world has moved to a cashless society with the peculiarities of our industry, including the issues around problem gambling, is the needle to try and thread,” Asher said.
Neely questioned whether the industry is set up to embrace technology. Amazon Alexa, the virtual-assistant technology people use in their homes, alerts people of what they need to order because they are running low on a product.
“How do we get Alexa to tell our players that they’re about to lose their free play?” Neely asked. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”
Amazon can do that, because it knows people and their preferences and habits, Neely said. Casinos have a cache of data and predictive analytics and more artificial intelligence capabilities are on the horizon, he added.
Asher said that while sports-betting operators have a lot of data, they haven’t used it as much as they could. If someone makes a particular sports bet, Asher said the bettor should get a text that the team is about to start play. The app would then open to that game instead of a generic screen.
“We don’t do any of that in the industry,” Asher said. “Over time, that’s the direction we’ll logically go, but right now, sports-betting apps are transactional. You make the bet and leave with some limited exceptions. How you move to a more engaging and immersive app is one of the things we’ll start to figure out as the industry matures.”
Wolfe told the audience that the tools are getting better and data is being more refined. There’s a convergence of paradigms, because it’s not just land-based gaming, but social gaming, sports betting, and igaming.
“We’ve been doing a lot of that over the last 18 months and the data that’s coming out of that is incredibly interesting,” Wolfe said. “The ability to cross-pollinate those businesses is very powerful and hopefully, data will be our most important currency in years to come. Whoever learns how to manage that will determine the winners and losers.”
