Brittany Pabon-Rose remembers the first time she realized how software could play a role in combatting theft.
An investigator and trainer with eConnect Global, Pabon-Rose watched a video of a woman at a Las Vegas Strip pizzeria deftly transferring a customer’s payment to underneath a register, ringing up “No Sale,” then pocketing the money for herself.
By the end of the day, using eConnect software, the woman was caught.
“Back in the day, we used to just use the cameras and just manually look around and arbitrarily find stuff,” Pabon-Rose said during Inside eConnect University: How Training Translates into Real Results and Real Career Growth,” a Tribal Gaming and Hospitality interactive webinar. “Maybe we’re going to get a call here or there, and very, very much after the fact. Supporting departments were so very reactive … sometimes even a day behind some incidents that are brought up. But now that we are coming into this new world, it’s not just us manually moving stuff anymore, and watching it week for stuff to happen. We’re more proactive, we’re data driven, and we’re trying to jump into matters much quicker than we did before.
With eConnect University – free to anyone who subscribes to eConnect – users have access to software that assists in identifying fraud and theft.
“You will still need to do the work. You still need to go and look into it,” Pabon-Rose said. “But as far as our various sessions that can help this transition from a reactive to a proactive team, we have facial recognition … real time alerts. This is John Doe. Go get him.”
The software from eConnect is customizable and able to focus on the needs of a company. There can be a focus on theft prevention or compliance on dashboards that can be created and monitored.
But the biggest gap, according to Pabon-Rose, is in facial recognition software.
“People can’t really put a monetary value on it,” Pabon-Rose said. “However, safety is loud nowadays. If you can get these people who are not wanted on your property out of there to give your people a safe space to relax – because that’s why we’re all here in the casinos, stadiums, we’re all relaxing and enjoying our time. The last thing they want to see is anybody who’s an undesirable ruining your day, especially if they’re violent.”
Jonathan Locy, eConnect customer success specialist, said their software is constantly evolving and available, including slot and player data. But what’s often missing is adequate training.
“If teams are not properly trained, the technology becomes underutilized, misconfigured, or reactive instead of proactive,” Locy said. “Ideally, we want to be proactive in the surveillance. One thing I constantly see during on-site and remote training is that many properties already have the powerful tools available, they just are not fully aware of what the system can actually do.”
Locy added that a trained surveillance team “knows what to look for, how to build queries, how to validate the data, how to identify suspicious activity early, and how to use their dashboards proactively instead of reactively.”
“In a surveillance team without training, alerts go ignored, dashboards go unused, queries become outdated, data quality issues stay unresolved,” Locy said. “If your system is down, no one knows that it’s down because they don’t know how to properly use it, and then teams rely on a manual process instead of automation.”
