Every business has customers, even if they seem to pretend they don’t. There is always an end-user who has to deal with the products you build or services you provide. And you likely have information, perhaps an unmanageable amount, on their preferences. From billing history, to usage habits, to loyalty data – you are already keeping track of your customers’ experiences. Yet, how are you actively managing customer experiences and expectations?

“In the context of the 21st century, we believe in engaging, interacting and predicting customer behavior.”

- Rizwan Patel, Director of IT, Caesars Entertainment

Companies like Caesars Entertainment can’t afford not to invest in the customer experience.  In terms of customers, the stakes can’t be any higher than in the casino gaming industry.  Unhappy customers seem to be an inherent part of the mechanics of gambling.  How do you keep customers happy when they are statistically proven to be handing your money more often than not?  Caesars had to create an entertaining experience around losing money and have succeeded so much that customers are happy to lose again and again and keep coming back. The thrill of the possibility to win, while surrounded by an entertaining atmosphere makes the risks worth taking and maybe even enjoyable to lose.

It may sound relatively simple, but consider Caesars’ economy of scale.  Caesars Entertainment owns over 50 casinos and hotels and is the largest gaming company with over $8.8 billion in annual revenue.  They can predict behavior on an individual basis that is scalable across their entire network of properties and services.  By leveraging an unparalleled wealth of customer behavior data they can tailor services to each customer automatically and in-the-moment of every gaming or purchasing decision.

It’s Getting Personal

The key for Caesars was integrating all their systems to create a personalized profile on each customer and how to serve them better.  When a customer sits down at any of their slots and swipes their loyalty card, the machine presents a menu of favorite drinks.  No more waiting for the waitress to ask for your order.  The real-time event of a card swipe automatically pulls up a customer profile which is correlated with event-data from all past touch points.  Systems like loyalty programs, billing, drink orders, and hotel information are integrated on the enterprise service bus, allowing Caesars to harness all of this information to manage each customer’s experiences in the moment.

Caesars manages the customer experience in traditional aspects of their business as well.  They understand some people still like to make hotel reservations on their phone, some prefer their computer, and some their mobile device.  Through an omni-channel approach, they accept any type of input to their reservation Enterprise Service that pulls up visitation history to any of their properties, correlates gambling history, calculates segmentation and quotes a customized price – again, all in real time.  This outcome may look simple, but behind the scenes all types of adapters need to take inputs from the Web, from phone inputs or from old-fashion voice reservations and employee input.  This input needs to “talk” with the various data systems of a customer’s loyalty profile.

How to Lose to Win

Caesars Entertaiment’s data correlation capabilities are so extensive they are able to track every gambler’s level of acceptable loss.  If a guest consistently leaves the slots after spending an average of $55, the system will trigger an automatic event at around $45 to make a personalized offer.  The system automatically notifies a member of the casino staff to physically present a complementary offer to the steakhouse, nightclub, or a show (based on history of customer behavior) to psychologically mitigate acceptable loss level.  In the end, a guest might stay longer to lose $75 in a session at the slots, but have gotten free tickets to the comedy show (seats that would not have been sold, costing the casino nothing).  The customer now doesn’t feel so bad about losing – he had a good time, and the casino mitigates the loss of perishable steaks that could go bad or unsold seats to a show.  This data-driven transaction creates a win-win-win with a happy customer, more gambling revenue, and mitigated risks.

“At Caesars Entertainment, we pride ourselves on being an event-enabled enterprise.”

- Rizwan Patel, Director of IT, Caesars Entertainment

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