Inside Asian Gaming

September 2014 inside asian gaming 69 Insights it’s an important part of the experience for many players. We don’t see the staff engage a lot with the players in Macau casinos. Unlike staff at casinos in the West, they don’t talk to the customers and often don’t even smile at them. Some casinos allow dealers to have limited conversations with the players, while some instruct them to have only necessary communication. This stems from a very old belief that dealers might work with the players and conduct fraud. If the dealers know the players well they may join forces with them and cheat the casino. We are trying to get the management to understand the Las Vegas style of having staff engage with the customers. Does management now want to train their staff to be more like the casino staff found in Las Vegas? Not yet. It has to do with security and a lot of other issues. The casinos here also don’t see the competition as intense as it is in Las “There are simple rules when it comes to customer service. Rule No. 1: If you want your customers to be happy, you need to make sure your staff are happy. How can you make your customers happy if your staff are grumpy every day?” Vegas because everybody is making money. The junkets are seeing the pressure, though, because their contribution to total gaming revenue is shrinking. The number of VIP players is shrinking, so the junkets have to do better to keep their customers. For the casinos the mass market is growing and they are making a lot of money so customer service is important but not as much of a priority. Training in Macau is only a pressing need when you have a problem. It has not been a high-priority item because it is not something that you undertake today and see the result tomorrow. Actually, the hardest part of training is to make management see things differently. We are doing more and more management-level training, but that’s not easy because they are so entrenched in their old ways of thinking. There are simple rules when it comes to customer service. Rule No. 1: If you want your customers to be happy, you need to make sure your staff are happy. How can you make your customers happy if your staff are grumpy every day? So would you say casino staff are more or less happy now than they were before? We haven’t done any research on this, but in general they have become more vocal about their needs. We are not sure whether they are not as happy or they are just more vocal. There are many reasons for them having become more vocal. Part of it is the current political climate, and the other part is they might have been unhappy over the past 10 years and finally now they feel they should voice their opinions. What do you think about the way casinos have been dealing with recent protests by their staff? It seems their main response is to hand out money to placate them. The casinos haven’t had to deal with these demands for a long time because their staff haven’t been very vocal in the past. Now it seems the casinos only deal with labor issues when workers voice their discontent. But they need to deal with them in a more systematic way. The casinos really need to understand why their staff are unhappy. Everybody wants a little bit more money, but there’s more to it than that. The casinos cannot continuously give in to the demands of their staff. There are deeper issues, and companies need to address the underlying reasons of why their staff are unhappy.