Vector Solutions is targeting the casino gaming industry for adoption of its LiveSafe mobile app, which provides a suite of self-service safety tools that allow employees to contribute to the safety and security of the company, guests, and themselves.
The intuitive mobile app enables staff to quickly submit information directly to security, access important safety and security resources, and receive critical information from the organization.
Vector will host a webinar on Tuesday geared for the casino industry. Register here for the event that runs from 11 a.m. until noon.
The webinar for casino-security professionals is titled “Learn How to Boost Safety and Communicate Effectively at Your Casino.” The focus is on prioritizing safety with technology. Suspicious activity, human trafficking, and theft are a few of the many security concerns faced by casinos every day. To stay ahead of bad actors conducting illicit activities at casinos and to ensure the safety of patrons, security teams need the right tools at their disposal, said Vector Enterprise Sales Director Jim Lee.
“We’re just getting started in the casino space,” Lee said.
Kristina Anderson, a survivor of the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting, co-founded LiveSafe as a response to why and how 11 classmates and one professor died from a lone gunman, a fellow student. The app, which was launched in 2011, alerts students on campus during emergencies.
“In her own investigation, she read the official after-action report commissioned by Virginia Tech and out of the hundreds of pages, the parts that stuck with her were the 17 indicators around the assailant before the attack that students, staff, and faculty noticed, but went unreported. And if any one of those things had been reported, there could have been a different outcome, and that’s the genesis of LiveSafe.”
LiveSafe can allow organizations to operate safer and smarter by engaging with their employees through the easy-to-use mobile app, Lee said.
It starts with reporting something someone sees, which isn’t like the traditional method of calling a phone number, filling out a form, or sending an email, Lee said. Those ways to report everything from human trafficking, suspicious activity, and theft were developed by people in the security and safety space, he said.
“We discovered at LiveSafe that it’s kind of a tightrope walk between building a platform for an end user who isn’t a security or safety professional,” Lee said. “It puts into context what they understand, compared to a security and safety expert who’s been trained what to look for. It doesn’t matter what reporting method you give them, security and safety experts are going to report it. They know what to do and are going to do it. Those not in that space don’t necessarily know what to look for and even if they do, they haven’t been trained. There’s going to be some doubt on how to report things.”
LiveSafe is a mobile-first platform, so individuals will find it user-friendly, Lee said. Every step put in front of people -the number of questions, information being sought, and methods to report things – can be seen as a barrier for doing so, he said.
“We’ve tried to take out as many barriers as possible,” Lee said. “It starts off with the design of the application. We use a card-based-app design like Twitter, Facebook, and other social-media app designs. There’s functionality in each card as you’re scrolling through.”
Lee said the application is in a format that people use in their lives every day. Going with that design also allows LiveSafe to add information ahead of time, telling users to report suspicious activity and giving an explanation and call to action.
“What we found through our focus groups is that it actually increases the likelihood that it pushes them to report things. If we just put a button on a screen that said report suspicious activity, a percentage of your population would say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to happen once I click on that button. Therefore, I’m never going to click on that button.'”
Lee said they landed on a simplistic way for reporting. Instead, people can say what they want and once that’s submitted to the dashboard, security staff can ask follow-up questions. Thus, reporting individuals can remain anonymous if they need to, he said.
“That gives some individuals a level of comfort in reporting things,” Lee said. “In certain cases, you might be reporting that a co-worker is stealing or something similar that you don’t want coming back on you.”
Lee said employees can submit a photo, video, or audio file. Even if users want to remain anonymous, they can have a back-and-forth with a security professional, he said.
“We also found that with the younger generation, asking individuals to report things by phone number is one of the worst ways to elicit information,” Lee said. “They’re not talking to their own parents on the phone. Asking them to call a number and talk to a stranger and hoping that they’ll remain anonymous is putting a lot of barriers in front of them.”
The focus groups and research revealed that a lot of people don’t necessarily know what to look for in terms of what to report, Lee said. After a training film, for example, people might be vigilant for a short term, but they lose that training over time.
“Other functionality we built in helps keep reporting certain things top-of-mind. The areas we try to focus on with casinos is human trafficking, theft, and armed guests, to name a few,” Lee said. “What we can do beyond giving them a way to report things is that we also have a resource section in the application that gives you details about what to look for in terms of hints about human trafficking that might be happening, what theft looks like, what you should do if you see an armed guest. It gives them those resources at their fingertips whenever they need it.”
LiveSafe also has a mass-notification function when an incident happens. LiveSafe trains their customers that it can be used to let people know if there’s a danger in their area. It can also be leveraged for mass notification to get tips from people who may have seen something worth reporting.
“You can push notifications by text and email as a mini-training for human trafficking and saying what three things to look for,” Lee said. “What we see in a lot of cases is not that people are or aren’t saying something, but they’re saying something and not realizing it’s worth bringing it up to the organization.”
Lee said they’re trying to make anonymous reporting as proactive in order to get critical information from employees very quickly.
“With any sort of system you put into place, the most important tip an employee submits is the first one,” Lee said. “It doesn’t matter how big or important that is, it sets the precedent that it works. They see that they did it correctly. You can’t have a system like this, especially a mobile app, where there’s a learning curve. We worked and worked with a lot of focus groups that had no idea what we did to make sure anyone at any point can download the application and almost intuitively know how to use the functionality once they’ve gone through the registration process.”
The mobile app has some self-service safety tools too. One helpful tool is designed for employees coming and going at all times of the day or having a lot of cash on them. If they don’t feel safe walking or driving, they can ask three phone contacts to virtually accompany them, Lee said. There’s even a panic button on that safe walk.
