Casino Customer Service

Maintaining good lines of communication is an important skill that casino employees can use to provide outstanding service and turn guests into advocates for their property.  Casino guests often believe that they did not receive good service because of poor communication.  The employee thought they did everything they could, but the guest still wanted more.  If there had been better communication up front – more questions asked, more listening – the whole process might have gone more smoothly and the guest probably would have walked out feeling like they had been heard and appreciated.  Guests who feel that way can become advocates for their favorite casino over time.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420

Casino service needs to be provided in a timely manner.  Guests only have a certain amount of time to play and employees should want to be sure every minute of it is spent at the casino where they work.  The faster guests are served, the more quickly they get what they want, the more likely they are to stay.  So whether an employee is bringing someone a drink while they’re on the casino floor, filling a guest’s machine or making a delivery to a hotel room, it’s very important that the employee be timely.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420

Casino employees can turn their guests into advocates for the property by being observant and anticipating their needs.  It’s smart to observe guests, but don’t spy on them.  Just watch and pay attention to them.  By watching what they do and how they do it, employees have an opportunity to know what guests want before they ask.  That kind of high-level service can turn guests into advocates for the casino.  For example, if a guest puts down an empty glass at a machine, bring a refill.  If someone can’t find the restroom, step forward and help them.  That simple act of observation sets a casino apart from the competition and truly impresses guests.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420

Casino managers pondering an internal improvement program to boost their property’s performance have struggled to determine the return on investment and now there is a way to calculate that kind of ROI.

For more than a decade, my company has been helping casinos improve their guest service and I’ve always hated the ROI question.  The chief financial officer always wants to know what the casino can expect to get in the way of a financial return on the money spent on improvement.  I’m pleased so say that there now is a way to answer that question.  ROI can be calculated by launching internal improvements that lead to the creation of guest advocates.

Here are some tips on guest advocacy and ROI.

Measure the Right Thing.  To determine ROI, casinos must stop measuring customer satisfaction and measure how many guest advocates they have.  There is good news from research published by Harvard University and further studied by the London School of Economics.  Researchers found that by tracking customer advocate levels, they could arrive at a very high correlation to the future growth of a business.  The higher the level of advocates, the more likely the business was to grow.

Advocacy Is Not the Same As Satisfaction.  Advocacy relates to a very specific and highly studied form of measurement.  If you hear the word advocate used as a generic term for guest satisfaction in gaming, understand that guest advocates and satisfied guests are not the same thing.  Advocacy and satisfaction are worlds apart.

Launch A System of Internal Improvement to Create More Advocates.  Advocates are created when casino employees behave in a certain manner and it takes a system of improvement to get them to display those behaviors.  It takes a system to move people from how they behave on the job now to how you want them to consistently behave.  All employees smile when the general manager walks by.  So how do casinos get them to repeat that simple, basic behavior with each guest?  Guests appreciate smiling employees and that is one behavior that can help turn them into advocates.

Help Employees Understand Why Improvement is Important.  Much of the resistance to improvement programs comes from team members who are not clear on why the improvement is being done.  At a casino that is already successful, it’s hard to get employees to understand that it’s all too easy to fall from the mountaintop.

Determine the Correlation Between Improvement and Future Growth.  The research published by Harvard found that in some industries, the correlation between the measurement of advocates and future growth was as high as 98 percent.  In gaming, I have found that it’s lower, but a mid-80 percent correlation from tracking advocacy is better than any other measurement tool available.

Advocacy has a high, measurable correlation to future growth.  And there you have it – an ROI based on proven, definable results.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420

When casino executives change their attitude about the cost and purpose of internal improvement programs and link them to creation of guest advocates, they are well on their way to establishing a return on investment that will help them determine the benefits of their efforts.  Too many casino executives view a measurement and improvement program, such as improved guest service, as an expense.  In reality, it’s an investment in the casino and its people.  An improvement program is not like bricks and gaming machines that management can show on a balance sheet, but it’s still an investment nonetheless.  And when the program is tied to the creation of guest advocates, tracking of ever-growing numbers of advocates and improved revenues can result in an actual ROI for the improvement program.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420

Casinos typically measure the wrong thing when they try to determine the return on investment they make in internal improvements designed to boost revenues, but there is a solution to the ROI problem.  Slots managers claim that improved casino performance is the result of a new mix of gaming machines.  Better guest service can lead to higher profits, but how can that be measured?  It isn’t the result of internal changes, but the chief executive officer often attributes higher revenue to the area’s growing economy.  Weather – good or bad – has been pointed to as the source of increased revenue during the past quarter.  But the only true ROI on internal improvement comes from creating guest and employee advocates and measuring how many the casino has.  The more it has, the more successful the property will be.

Martin R. Baird
Robinson & Associates, Inc.
mbaird@casinocustomerservice.com
www.advocatedevelopmentsystem.com
www.casinocustomerservice.com
480-991-6420