Being a casino host is no easy job. Meeting the demands of a diverse customer base, keeping them happy when they’re probably losing and handling their needs during visits are daunting tasks-managing those hosts to maximize profitability is even harder.
Traditionally, the social aspects of the job were paramount. But today, as guest volumes grow and the gaming floor produces millions of data points from various gaming and financial systems, the challenges are (literally) beyond human capabilities. That’s why a new software solution from Quick Custom Intelligence (QCI) has quickly grown from a start-up to managing nearly 3,000 sites and over 1,000 hosts in just over a year.
QCI, launched by legendary data scientists and mathematicians, Andrew Cardno and Dr. Ralph Thomas, has several modules for advanced slot, marketing and table game analytics; but it is their new “Host” module that is generating buzz from operators.
Both founders were always intrigued by the old casino adage: “You don’t make money off Slots. You don’t make money off Players. You make money when Players sit down and play those Slots!” They realized that hosts were critical to making that play happen, particularly with the highly-profitable VIP segments, but the hosts desperately needed some easy-to-use tools to accomplish their goals.
Background
In the mid-1990’s, the business industry coined the term “CRM.” “Salesforce,” which is the category leader today says, “CRM is an acronym that stands for customer relationship management. It… is any tool, strategy, or process that helps businesses better organize and access customer data.”
Salesforce adds, “It all started with handwritten notes and Rolodexes, but with the advent and proliferation of digital technology, it eventually evolved into databases stored on individual computers…It was no longer just notes. Managing your business’s relationships with customers became a complicated process.”
Salesforce simplified the process, and their CRM was a hit. Their booming business allowed them to build the tallest tower in downtown San Francisco in 2018. Many casinos adopted this CRM software (from Salesforce or others) to tackle their host management issues, allowing them to track generic guest preferences, contacts, birthdays and details such as their pet’s names (even fine grain details are important in developing solid personal relationships).
However, like many other vanilla software packages that our industry has tried to adopt or modify, generic CRMs were never intended for casinos. That has been a critical shortcoming.
Most CRMs are designed to capture robust customer demographics, but can only handle a limited number of sales transactions. Recording the thousands and thousands of data points generated by slot and table game play (the “sales” in a casino) and tracking the constantly changing nature of those sales over multiple stays, restaurant visits, countless promotional events, hotel nights or special events is an entirely different animal.
Cardno says a CRM program for a casino host can be unbelievably complicated, “Hosts today are incredibly talented and well-educated, but they are called upon to keep abreast of everything from the names of the player’s children and birthdays to their gaming preferences and credit ratings. While traditional CRMs can easily handle anniversaries and a player’s drink preferences; few systems can analyze complex gaming data in real-time and suggest actionable strategies that hosts can use to improve their relationships with their assigned players.”
Yet, those complex metrics are the key to making profitable business decisions on the casino floor. The hallmark of a good casino host is to balance the guest’s needs with the company’s success. Simply rewarding a player without understanding the nature of their play is seldom optimal. A host’s true mission is to gain guest loyalty for the property while maximizing the profitability of that allegiance.
QCI was designed from scratch to do that, and to provide links between diverse software packages like Hotel, F&B POS, Reservations, gaming systems and more. Importantly, it needs to do all that quickly without requiring programmers and/or super computers.
Data warehouses emerged years ago to integrate inputs from different casino systems into one repository to better understand the relationships between things like F&B, Hotel and slot machine play. They were a breakthrough that opened the door to concepts like a player’s “total value.” The downside was that these warehouses generally required data scientists to build and maintain them and programmers to analyze and extract the data. Frustratingly, changing a warehouse structure to track emerging trends, new products or demographic shifts was a slow and expensive undertaking.
Birth of Quick Custom Intelligence
That’s where the QCI co-founders benefitted from some recent time away from gaming. Thomas had a strong math and casino analytics background (two Masters degrees and a Ph.D.), while Cardno was considered the world’s leading expert on visualization of gaming data using computerized cartography. They met when Cardno founded Viz Explorer in 2007, and the two worked closely together before they both left Viz a few years back.
During their time away from casino gaming, they worked in the world of educational software and became active in data warehouse forums. This led to the realization that rather than modify the warehouses themselves, they could use the latest technology to develop a method of version control with QCI that would modify and update their software quickly. That would ensure their clients can easily be updated with the latest features, yet still allow everyone to be on the same release. The structure of the individual casino data warehouses remained intact. Only the way QCI interacts with the warehouse changes. It made both training and updates manageable.
That has been an anchor around the necks of traditional slot/table games systems or warehouse tools from the major providers for years. Their upgrades can be costly and take months since they are bound by older technology (and slowed by regulatory constraints).
Therefore, it comes as no surprise that most casinos (including the largest corporate customers) are continually on different versions. That makes training and maintenance a nightmare for the system vendors. They have to maintain all their earlier releases, while making sure the oldest ones still work and don’t interfere with new elements in the latest version.
Other than continually adding new features, the QCI upgrades (which come every six to eight weeks) are virtually transparent to users and are covered by the basic subscription fees. Training is the same for every customer (and is unlimited with a subscription).
With their latest Host module in QCI, they’ve created a fine-tuned CRM system for casino hosts and host managers that is seamlessly integrated with the casino floor. It puts the figurative ‘carrot’ right in front of the host in real time, so they can see how they are progressing to their quarterly goals and it gives the entrepreneurial host all the tools they need to activate their player list.
The system can alert a host that the slot director is adding more of a VIP’s favorite machines (or, God forbid, removing some). It can generate lists of players with changes in play patterns (spotting potential churn), it can show fine details of how, when and where a guest likes to play (and importantly provides that information in real-time to see action as it occurs). QCI can measure the profitability of individual events on a player-by-player basis and/or modify future invitations to make those events work even better. And much more.
Hosts have also been raving about QCI’s “Player Dossier” page which shows them an easy-to-read dashboard of each player, including a colorful map showing their home location in relationship to the casino, providing all the basic demographic info, detailing their most-recent play activity and updating the hosting status.
Visualization has always been a strength of the QCI development team, and this new QCI dashboard is no exception. Best of all, it works equally well on the desktop in the office or on casino floor with a mobile device.
All the system parameters are easily set by a host or manager, with minimal training and absolutely no programming. If a new metric arises (such as “unique time-of-day” queries or “new game devotion indicators”), they can be added quickly as part of the regular upgrades).
With the early development of their host tool, the team then focused on how to better manage this diverse group. A headline story in “Forbes” two years ago proclaimed, “The Best Sales Reps Are Not The Best Managers.” That credo easily applies to the casino world and hosts. It comes as no surprise to casino veterans that moving a great floor “host” to the host “manager” was seldom successful in the past. The development team realized that these managers need some new tools.
The well-researched “Forbes” article by Kathi Graham-Leviss acknowledged that sales persons (and hosts) are gifted with superb intuition and great social skills. But she wrote, “Our data shows that managers score significantly higher on data-driven decision making, indicating they are more likely to combine multiple sources of information, metrics and data to make decisions. While intuition still matters, hard data will matter more in a managerial role. This allows managers to make decisions that are contrary to common wisdom or past practice; instead, they will follow the data.”
Stereotypically, casino hosts were often graded by their outgoing personalities, their willingness to please and, occasionally, just their appearance. Old school KPIs would include the talent to tell a good joke, a low golf handicap and the ability to be the life of any party. Those characteristics are not necessarily keys to success as a manager (and maybe they aren’t really the best metrics for host productivity either).
The recruiting firm Indeed.com says, “Good managers can set achievable goals and create strategies to meet those goals. Setting smart goals is one approach that uses objectives that are specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time-based, so they can easily translate into effective strategies.”
That’s why the Host Manager profile within QCI Host was designed to set mutual goals with the hosts and a system that can then track, measure, and monitor the criteria on a real-time basis. Some of the recent feedback indicates that managers love the “Tasking and Task Tracking” feature which scores hosts on diverse metrics including emails sent, calls made, contacts, players hosted, comps awarded, gaming spend and even prospecting success. Having this data provides productive feedback and improves guest and player satisfaction.
It’s why a growing number of users have discovered that Quick Custom Intelligence achieved their goal of developing a true system that “helps hosts to get their players playing more.” And they’ve provided the tools for managers to help those hosts work more efficiently. As a bonus, no one will forget the names of player’s pets either (details do matter).
