Inside Asian Gaming

inside asian gaming September 2014 68 to be more competitive in the market, and slowly all the other major junkets saw the need for it. Junkets have started to manage themselves very differently, and now some of them are listed companies, so they have to have proper governance, proper training. Is there a difference between the courses offered for the staff in the casinos and the junkets? They are very different. Most casino operators have very clear internal guidelines stating that employees need to get trained for 30 hours a year, and they have brought in many different types of training—all sorts of skills, including those related to performing specific jobs as well as soft skills, which are mostly what I train, such as communications and personal relations. How is your training different to that offered by the human resources departments of the casinos? Usually, they don’t have a lot of trainers. Their training departments consist of a bunch of coordinating people. They train a little bit, but not a lot, and focus on the hard skills. Some of their trainers come from individual departments. Take the F&B department, for example. It would train its own people how to perform the tasks required of them, and HR would help arrange it. What are the major topics covered in your training? It depends on where the staff is on the curve. But the biggest one is still customer service. If they are just starting out, we start with the basic customer service skills and explain to them why people come to gamble. Most of them still have the notion that people come to gamble because they want to win money. This is partly true, but on the other hand, gamblers have other expectations. We ask the staff: “If people do come and want to win money, can we deliver a win? We cannot. So it’s better to look at it as paying for a service—they come and get entertained, and we charge them a little bit of money to entertain them.” People in the gaming industry need to understand we are a fee-charging industry. Customers’ expectations of winning money cannot be fulfilled, and we have to look at all their other needs and see what we can do to make them happy. Many gamblers believe in patterns and luck. How do you train the staff about these things? It’s a little bit tricky, a bit of a dilemma. They have to know that all those things are not real, and yet, they need to be able to talk to customers about them because Insights “We try to educate management. We tell them if they manage to build some loyalty and some team spirit the staff will probably stay longer. It’s a choice between having unskilled, unmotivated staff who will leave anyway and having skilled, motivated staff who may stay a little longer.”