Inside Asian Gaming

May 2008 | INSIDE ASIAN GAMING 17 C asinos put a lot of effort into their front-of-house operation to create the right mix of games and the right service culture to attract and retain players. Less publicised is the science that goes into calibrating and interpreting the behaviour of guests once they arrive and their relationship with their favourite games, offers and amenities. From the moment a player crosses a casino threshold, he or she is a walking, talking bundle of revenue potential. Operators want to know not only what they play, how they play, when they play and of course how much they wager, but also how they interact with the different parts of the casino’s offer. They also want to know if they stop playing or if their playing activity starts declining. Once that’s identified and measured, the management works to understand what motivated it, and if necessary do something about it. Making data count The challenge often for casinos is not a lack of information on players, but making sense of the information they’ve got. They need to convert all the figures into valuable market intelligence that can be acted on in a coherent and timely manner. Getting this right brings major financial benefits. US operator Harrah’s is on record saying tens of millions of dollars was added to its bottom line by utilising information from Bally’s visualization tool. The former Victories Casino and Hotel in Petoskey,Michigan (now Odawa Casino Resort) reported its revenue grew by US$6-8 million within the first eight months of adopting these methods. Colour-coded For Bally,data visualisation comes in several forms,but principally it involves representing human behaviour not in real action video or bar graphs, but in a hybrid of the two. One particularly striking version of this is a program using the visual techniques of thermal imaging with ‘hot’ areas of human activity in a casino indicated in red, cooling through orange and yellow to shades of blue to indicate lesser activity or lower revenue generation. When this technique is presented in animated form with a time clock as a day,aweek or even amonth in the life of a casino,it serves as a very powerful tool to help managers make sense of the numbers. Bally Business Intelligence Solution tools include Market Basket Analysis, offering at-a-glance representations of traffic patterns and product purchases so that managers can optimise general floor layout and positioning of merchandise, and devise effective cross marketing and relocation strategies. Insights Player profiles can be combined with visualisations to give insights on issues such as: how products work on a floor to attract and keep patrons; how far patrons will travel on the casino floor to play their favourite games; the impact of traffic patterns on game play; whether differing types of patron groups are compatible; or understanding whether community-style games justify their cost by generating sufficient standalone revenue or attracting other players to that part of the floor. Once customer activity is visualised and understood, operators have the option of either encouraging consumers to modify that behaviour in ways beneficial to the property’s bottom line or modifying the floor to account for the behaviour. Easy-to-read Bally Visual Analysis uses programs that convert dense data on topics such as foot traffic and time played and turns them into easy- to-interpret colour-coded maps. Hot Spots Thermal-style visualisation shows what works on the casino floor Data Analysis