SkyCity Entertainment Group in New Zealand, a casino and hospitality company, has expanded a strategic partnership with Quick Custom Intelligence. The goal was to build a more connected, enterprise-wide approach to customer and operational intelligence across its business.
“SkyCity is very strategic to us because they are just moving into the regulated online gaming world, and they’re integrating it with their brick-and mortar casino,” Andrew Cardno, QCI’s Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer, said during an interview with CDC Gaming. “We have done this before, but this is a very large strategic operator, operating across two countries, New Zealand and Australia.”
Cardno, a native of New Zealand, admits the project was close to his heart because of its location. It also was challenging because of the complexity.
“There’s a lot to learn about how to do this,” Cardno said. “How do our customers like to engage in both? What does it look like as an omnichannel business, not a single channel. It is truly putting Sky City, I think, in a sophisticated place where they’re now a fully integrated digital physical environment-like omnichannel environment.”
The expansion reflects a broader industry shift toward unifying data across gaming, hospitality, and digital environments to enable faster, more informed decision-making and improved customer outcomes.
But the actual unification of the various environments is difficult.
“If you think about your hotel system, maybe you’ve got a valet system. Maybe you’ve got a point-of-sale system,” Cardno said. “These systems operate in their own world, and I think the gaming industry globally is not a big user of these systems.
“If you look at hotel systems, the hotel systems vendors are really huge outside of gaming. They have these enormous capabilities, and a small portion of it is used inside of inside a resort casino, for example. And it makes the integration very complex, because they’re designed to be the primary tool for the operation of these facilities.”
The problem for Cardno and QCI was to get the systems to work together, even though they are fundamentally not designed to mesh. The very nature of the problems they attack are not similar.
Cardno calls it “heartbreaking” because of the complexity.
“There’s this expectation of perfection, which is an impossible problem,” Cardno said, adding he’s been working in the field for about 25 years. “The inexperienced have their heart broken by trying to solve the impossible. … I have I’ve seen people break all the time.”
But while it’s difficult to come up with data that accomplishes digital integration, Cardno has installed processes within the QCI team that increase the chances of success.
“We have a data science team inside QCI, and I spend a lot of my time passing on the knowledge of how to be successful, teaching that a process that will get them to success,” he said. “Things like, let’s start with you can’t prove data is correct. Very, very clever people who I’ve worked with over the years, and I made the mistake myself.
“When I first started projects, I would say, I can prove the data is correct. And I learned that is of the biggest mistakes you can make, because all it takes is one counter example, one banned player you didn’t know about, or some blown meter that was calculated in a different way, or some unusual report. All it takes is that, and the whole project is dead because you’ve just made the statement, ‘oh, the data is correct,’ and all they need to do is show you wrong. Show you one example, despite it being wildly accurate, just one example, and the whole thing, your whole position, and it’s dos wrong and they’re right.
“So, tackling the impossible is the first lesson on what not to do. They don’t expect that.”
