Identifying guest trends

May 20, 2020
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Eric Cunningham, Training and Marketing Manager of casino management system supplier Table Trac, Inc., explains how today's analytics can answer questions casino operators will be asking themselves; this article was originally published in the March/April edition of Gaming America magazine.

Today’s casinos are full of an overwhelming amount of information that can be used to keep a property relevant, productive and ahead of the competition. Whether it is historical, predictive or exploratory data, we need someone or something to tell us which direction to turn when planning for the future and how to react to changing trends. Having valuable in-depth insight into the performance of our casino can create added efficiencies and give us the confidence to make proactive business decisions. 

For years, spreadsheets have been the go-to workhorse for gathering information, but they are not user or viewer friendly. When it comes to understanding what is happening and, most importantly, answering why it is happening, interactive dashboards and visualizations are the future.

Casino operations are now able to use intuitive analytical software to eliminate the arduous task of pulling reports, compiling information, and building visual representations to empower their teams to get the most out of their data with straightforward, easy to understand visualizations. These products offer the ability for visualizations to be generated each day automatically by linking relevant databases and extracting only the necessary data to assess and address performance. Using standardized reporting structures that produce intuitive data regularly, these visualizations are also now interactive and can answer the most critical question posed by any operator: Why?

Why are the guests coming to our property?

Why are there not more guests?

Why are they not staying longer?

Why are we making this much revenue?

Why are we not making more revenue?

Today’s analytical software tools can drill down years’ worth of data with a few mouse clicks to quickly view any segment of your gaming or player performance data. By quickly choosing a couple of parameters, all levels within organizations can see the impact (both positive and negative) their department is having on the overall success of the casino through interactive and exportable dashboards. Top-level management can now quickly recognize the coin-in, net win, and freeplay impact for all of their properties, to identify areas that need immediate attention and take action through automatically generated dashboards and reports delivered to their email before they even get to the office.  

Guest participation is the very building block of operational success. With thousands of guest preferences possible, it  operators are tasked with finding as many diverse promotions, game variations, floor layouts, and other non-gaming amenities as we can to maintain and increase guest participation. Using easily configurable flash reports and dashboards to follow where the data leads, we can identify promotions that have the highest guest participation, deliver a strong ROI and identify which games continuously have the lowest win per unit to replace them with games that are top performers, maintaining a fresh game selection. 

Through proper data management, performance monitoring and influence factoring, we can create and maintain a productive business model while growing a solid guest base. With guests driving productivity, how we react to that level of participation is the responsibility of operators.

By adequately measuring how guests enjoy their experience, we can focus our efforts and actions toward maximizing their time with us. Identifying guest trends real-time through thoughtfully designed analytic tools allows us to know why we are performing at our current level and what we can do to keep relevant, productive and ultimately ahead of our competition.

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