Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming October 2016 18 “After spending tens of thousands of dollars carefully planning apps for customers, four out of five people who download it will use it only once before deleting it.” Features The inevitable conclusion from this math is that, despite lots of time and money and the best of intentions, property-created mobile apps will simply not be used by a significant subset of their patrons. Furthermore, as smartphone adoption rates continue to rise, the level of commercial app adoption is not likely to change materially. COMPETITIVE DISADVANTAGE Now, if these incredibly low numbers are not enough to make you reconsider your mobile strategy, consider the competition for app time. For example, when a customer is looking for a dining option at your property, will they use your app or instead go straight to Yelp? If a patron is looking for general property information, will they use the app or go through Google? The harsh reality is your property-specific app is competing with incredible amounts of capital being poured into sophisticated application developments. Furthermore, these incredible applications are full of rich data collected from social media and the like. Of course, operators can compete with these platforms, but they will need constant investment and a real dedication to driving value from the application. Even then, these operators can still expect very low usage rates. To be clear, difficulties in establishing applications does not exonerate gaming properties from trying to become more active participants in the mobile space, since casino customers are still buried in their mobile devices looking at social media, responding to text and e-mail and entertaining themselves if they are bored. The challenge is: how do operators enter this world in a meaningful way? Enter interactive media and chatbots! GETTING CHATTY A chatbot is a clever computer program that responds to typed questions from a human. The technology behind the chatbot is complex and relies on natural language processing, artificial intelligence and sophisticated rules engines. Facebook has launched a Bots for Messenger that allows a person to automatically communicate with hundreds of millions of users using direct text interaction. We’re excited about these bots and what they mean for operators who need to step into the mobile world and interact with their customers. This means we are entering the age of interactive automated messaging. Interactive e-mail and multimedia messaging (MMS) is emerging as a vastly better and less expensive option than a mobile app, giving casinos the opportunity to deliver enriched messages directly to their target audiences and with which those audiences