With any number of customer touchpoints on a casino’s property, operators are exploring the business and technology issues associated with linking them together into a single networked gaming resort.

From a business standpoint, it’s easy to see how an integrated network can improve customer satisfaction and retention. Enabling customers to use player cards for any transaction, from the gaming floor to food and beverage, entertainment, and room services, would provide a built-in mechanism for improving the overall guest experience.

“Improving the overall customer experience is the primary objective of a networked gaming resort,” said Tim Stanley, chief information officer at Harrah’s Entertainment. “The question is how do we create a seamless and engaging flow for the customer through all the touchpoints of a property, including gaming, F&B, entertainment, the room experience and the retail experience?”

With knowledge of a customer’s transactions, a networked system can recommend choices based on the customer’s known preferences. If a customer has indicated a preference for a certain type of entertainment or food and beverage, for example, the system could send a text message alerting the customer to seating availability at venues providing that entertainment or those F&B items.

The major components of a networked resort include a customer tracking database and “an account-based set of systems that allows customer transactions to seamlessly flow across the property,” Stanley said. “Whenever a customer interacts with a touchpoint, the system can provide information to and get information from that customer.”

The component that the customer sees most directly is the player card, which is used to access many services on a property. “The good and bad part about player cards is that there’s a proliferation of these little pieces of plastic with mag strips,” Stanley said. “In practice, however, there are only four or five set of touchpoints within a property where cards are useful — slots, occasionally table games or racetrack, marketing [kiosks, comps, redemptions, check-in points] and restaurants.”

Harrah’s R&D efforts revolve around finding ways to make the customer’s presence known throughout a single property, as well as across other properties that a customer might visit — an effort that Stanley admits is “daunting.” A critical technology, which Stanley said Harrah’s has developed, is a service-oriented architecture that allows software applications to talk to each other using Internet protocols.

Creating networked gaming

"Improving the overall customer experience is the primary objective of a networked gaming resort. The question is, how do we create a seamless and engaging flow for the customer through all the touchpoints of a property, including gaming, F&B, entertainment, the room experience, and the retail experience?” —Tim Stanley, chief information officer, Harrah’s Entertainment

Serving a need

Most operators provide at least some networked services already. At Barona Valley Ranch Resort & Casino, for example, guests can use their player cards as room keys. “That sort of integrates hotel and players club into one card, and they can also use it at the point of sale to redeem points for food for merchandise,” said Tony DeLeon, a consultant for Barona’s technology and gaming initiatives. “We are continuing to explore ways to integrate the customer experience.”

The technology needs to be robust enough to encompass every conceivable type of gaming device, display and software application. “Networked gaming requires starting from the bottom up to ensure that every single POS device resides on a high-speed network,” said Vio Nicola, Barona’s assistant general manager of technology. “It means building an infrastructure that not only provides high-speed network access, but one that’s highly secure.”

The vision of a network of interconnected devices on the gaming floor, at the front desk, and in restaurants is “some ways off,” said Greg Shay, president and CEO of VCAT LLC, which provides technology consulting services to Barona. “The networked resort can be likened to the Internet, which started out as a bunch of disparate applications that ended up being linked together into a large e-commerce hub.”

Casinos are also looking at portable customer ID tracking devices such as RFID-enabled smart cards, but are taking a cautious approach. “We haven’t yet established the rules of the road for [using RFID]. Is there an opportunity to put RFID tags on cards so customers can be located? How would that change the customer experience?” DeLeon said.

Still, networking offers a number of tantalizing possibilities, said Wayne Schaffel, president of Public Relations Network, which provides PR and marketing services to casinos. To promote player loyalty, a property could create an online casino and allow players to use the points on their player cards to play reel slots and/or video poker.

New electronic poker tables would make it easy for a casino to set up outdoor poker parlors, Schaffel said. And with casinos moving to server-based technology, they have an opportunity to go Wi-Fi and provide players with hand-held slot machines and devices that can be played on the beach, in restaurants or in rooms.

The fully networked property

Operators are looking at defining the parameters of a networked property. The Oneida Nation, for instance, was awarded a patent in 2006 for an interactive resort services system to provide merchandise purchasing or activity scheduling. The system allows guests at a hospitality facility to request services from a remote terminal. For example, guests can order merchandise (such as event tickets, food and drink, and retail items), make reservations (at hotels, restaurants and golf courses, to name a few), and transfer funds between their gaming and services accounts. The system can store and update guest preference information each time a guest requests a service at the remote terminals. Based on the stored guest preference information, hospitality facility operators, through interactive menus displayed on the remote terminals or through another communication medium, can selectively offer each guest those services most desired by the guest.

A guest wishing to request hospitality facility services can establish an account and receive a magnetic ID card at a service-client station located at the front desk of a hotel or at an account establishment terminal. Preferably, the guest provides an operator with some identifier information (e.g., name, address and/or date of birth) and preference information (e.g., preferred beverage, snack, language, restaurant and/or golf course).

An “amenities server” establishes a services account file for the guest and issues the guest a unique services account number. In addition, the operator may ask the customer to select a personal identification number (PIN) via a keypad. The guest identifier information, the account number and an encrypted version of the PIN is then stored on a magnetic strip on a magnetic identification card issued by a conventional system.

Designating the amount of funds to be placed in a guest’s services account can be done a variety of ways. For example, the guest could deposit money in the services account, the hospitality facility could preauthorize a predetermined amount in the services account, or a credit card company could preauthorize a predetermined amount in the services account.

The interactive services system includes an account establishment terminal or service-client station that could include a scanning device for scanning and storing a guest’s signature, photograph or driver’s license. In one model, recognition software detects the guest’s identifier information from the driver’s license. In an alternative model, the guest’s identification and preference information could be sent over the Internet to the hospitality facility, so the guest’s card would be ready when the guest arrived. In yet another model, guests are automatically registered for the interactive services system upon arrival at the hospitality facility.

Steve Marlin is a New York-based freelance writer who specializes in technology issues.