The Future of Customer Experience – The Casino Way!

You ask a bunch of people why they visit a Casino, and the answers would always be different. It would be food, nightlife, the atmosphere, parties, and events.

The answer would never be gambling.

In the early days, casino revenues came majorly from gambling, but that has changed entirely now. Only a third of their revenues come from gambling today, and the remaining gains are due to food & beverage, hotel, entertainment, and nightlife. 

No one considers gambling or life at a casino a wise and prudent financial choice. However, people end up spending so much money there. Why?

It is because of the customer experience that the casino provides.

What Do Casinos Get Right When It Comes to Customer Experience?

• Everyone on the floor will know if someone wins big, with the flashing lights and noises. Anyone coming onto the floor sees and hears evidence that other people are winning.
  • This is what your case studies and customer success stories do on your website.

• Everywhere you go in Vegas hotels, there is an opportunity for you to gamble. You are tempted to throw a coin in here and there and often stay and play for a while.
  • This is the call-to-action you have on your website – to lure and engage your audience.

• They provide free rooms, food, and drinks to loyal customers and big spenders. Keep them there for more time with the experience.
  • These are the offers and freebies you have for your audience on your website.

• They use chips rather than cash. Once the players change their money into chips, they tend to spend entirely rather than going back and getting the remaining cashed.
  • This is very similar to getting your shipping free when you buy for a minimum of 500 bucks. Whether or not the customer needs, they buy products worth 500 bucks to get free shipping.

• They offer free drinks. Drunk people take more risks than sober people, and there’s nothing like a paid-up bar tab to make you feel like you have extra cash to burn.
  • When a customer registers at your site, you load their account with a free bonus for them to use while buying products from you. Then it becomes a habit, and you become a customer for life.

• They are entirely data-driven. They decide if a customer gets a free hotel room, slot credit, golf, transportation, sold-out tickets, or a room upgrade. They make sure that these offers are profitable with the right margins for the casino. The casino delivers suggestions that have low variable costs and high perceived value. They use high-speed data analytics to develop predictive modeling techniques to understand different customer scenarios and see what can be provided as an offer.
  • Most things that you do as a business are also data-driven. For instance, I bought an electronics item from you, and now you know the most likely accessories I would need. Throw an offer around those accessories, and I will likely pick the suggestion.

• Casino business is all about discovering needles in a haystack. For a casino, they might just be a million-dollar customer.
  • Your entire marketing engine functions to identify your large customers who make or break your business. Your marketing campaigns, automation, and BI analytics & reporting is geared towards identifying these outlier customers that would bring the most revenues to your business.

• Co-creation is the name of the game in a casino. Co-creation is the process by which products, services, and experiences are jointly developed by the operator, its partners, and the final consumer, leading to a new space.
  • In your case, you have conversations with the customers, understand how well they are using your products and services, how you can better them, and what else they are looking at. You have multiple such conversations, and the most commonly asked features are incorporated in the products first, and you go from there to create the experience your customers desire.

These are some of the pointers that businesses can learn from casinos in providing the best possible customer experience. I have tried to give an example for each of the pointers mentioned here. However, they are not restricted only to these examples. There are multiple ways in which organizations can use these casino good practices.