Smarter Integration
Quest to enhance customer relationships – Are you holding the right cards?
What does Data Integration mean to a successful organization in the gaming, entertainment & hospitality industry? It means everything if it’s done right! The comparison of these industries is important as the event (occupancy) is time bound and there is a cost attached to its expiry.
Every single day, the gaming & hospitality industry faces a new and growing challenge. Consumers are demanding more from businesses. They are seeking relevance and customization.
I have tried to relate, collaborate and identify the key requirements of this industry from two perspectives: as a customer and as a data integration architect. This article describes data integration as the underpinning service that can take advantage of the information embedded in the data, and play many interesting roles in predictive analytics.
Let me present few examples to delve into this:
Challenge 1 – Does your organization suffer from poor data integration?
Customer’s dilemma: I travel by air quite regularly. I do my own reservations. Every time I book the ticket, the airline prompts me to get my own seat- in spite of my traveling many times on the same airline, with a preference for a particular seat, say 1A (Even when the seat is not taken!). I would be a very happy customer if they knew their loyal customer’s (My!) preferences. Is it too difficult for the airline to track my preferences in one place?
Architect’s perspective: This is a classic example of data integration not designed well. The answer is NO; it isn’t difficult to remember the customer’s preference. In such a scenario it is essential to architect and design a system that will capture the relevant data; in this case, store information about the customer’s profile with preferences. Preparing data to accommodate these analytics is essential to success.
Challenge 2 – Increasing the effectiveness of data access and analysis
Customer’s dilemma: I am a creature of habit. I know when exactly I want to take my time off to go my favorite vacation spot -Las Vegas. What interests me the most in Vegas? Casino games, good food and some rest & recreation with my friends. The irony is that I am invited to shows that I don’t go to, to games that I don’t ever play and least of all, asked to visit them in a season that I have never gone in. The bottom line is – my ‘favorite’ casino never understood my needs!
Architect’s perspective: This is an ideal scenario to perform customer profiling. It’s critical for the design of a data integration strategy to be governed by the reports that the casino could use for their email campaign. It is always crucial to remember how data is relevant to how it’s being used. Systems can be designed to understand ROI for these campaigns by tracking conversion ratios.
This illustrates the need to consolidate additional information to help maximize value; get data from different sources to create a total view for segmentation. Only when you construct this single view, can you analyze and profile your customer and know what you want to offer each of them.
Some of the different sources of data could be;
- The different spend on each category at the hotel – measure, analyze and report on gaming vs. non-gaming activities (such as hotel, spa, entertainment etc.)
- Integrate financial information and measure level of success/failure at gaming.
- Integrate financial metrics with customer satisfaction feedback to measure likelihood of retention/loyalty.
A consolidated analysis can identify your best (most profitable) customers, their preferences, their customer satisfaction scores, their response to promotions and resultant loyalty/visits and spend.
Challenge 3 – Getting the big picture
Customer’s dilemma: My friends do not play the tables, but they hone in on the slots. A few spend time in shopping and a few in an extravagant spread at a fancy restaurant. I, on the other hand like to do it all. Well, may be a little less on shopping. To be honest, I expect comps when I spend a lot of money at the table. And ‘when’ I get comped lies in the hands of people who are taking note of what I am playing, how frequently I play and of course how often I win. Case in point, on my last trip to Vegas, I had to write an unhappy note to my casino host who said I did not play enough for him to comp me, but finally had to succumb to the pressure of losing me altogether to another casino. It is pretty sad that they could not see my contributions to their revenue and profits in one single view.
Architect’s perspective: To understand what the consumer’s interests and activities are, it is important to build a comprehensive method for rating the consumer across gaming and hospitality. It would add a tremendous value to design a system that provided the host with the details of the customer’s expense and ratings, both past and current. With such a system in place, the host can address what it takes to retain the right customer.
For this, we as data integration architects need to understand and identify the KPIs that could impact the business.
Smarter Integration- Holy Grail of Business Intelligence
Data Integration gives you access to a unified view of each customer of your organization. It enables a “360-degree view”. This is the key to unlocking the potential value stored across the numerous data sets and reports floating around the organization. Customer analytics enables a business analyst to gain greater insight into historical customer activity and enhance ongoing customer interactions. Assessing customer profiles can drive decisions based on predictions of customer behavior. Clearly, data integration is critical to this process since you must have access to all the information about a customer along with the customer’s history to build customer analytics.
The design of a good data integration process often may not seem economical at first, but a bad solution having the upfront savings are often quickly lost as demands on resources increase. A well-designed data integration strategy ensures consistency and unanimity of the enterprise data architecture. It ensures that there is common business language and uses the same semantic definitions. It includes capabilities such as metadata integration, ongoing updates and maintenance, access to a wider variety of data sources, and design and debugging options.
I see this as both an art and a science to design effective data integration architecture. And to provide this information real time would empower even the line employees and supervisors with the information necessary to impact business.
In this era of cloud computing when there is potential data prevailing in reservations, point of sale, gaming floor data, slots data, sports booking data, financial data, customer service, customer loyalty, campaign data, web logs, mail, email, media and social networking, it is a good gamble to bet on service oriented data integration strategy to keep the momentum going. Turn all the glitter into gold!
Srinivasan Ramaswamy
Srini Ramaswamy is the COO & Co-Founder of Systech Solutions Inc., a LA based Business Intelligence firm specializing in date warehousing & analytics solutions for gaming, entertainment & hospitality industry. He can be reached at srini@systechusa.com or 818-827-5646
