Caesars Entertainment Corporation Q&A: Customer Loyalty is Built Across Every Touch Point

Caesars Entertainment Corporation operates some of the most renowned gaming brands in the industry including Harrah’s, Caesars and Horseshoe casinos. These establishments regularly excite and delight guests with memorable customer experiences both inside and outside each casino property. Through a unique mix of omni-channel customer engagement, digital and social technology, and an extremely popular loyalty program known as Total Rewards, Caesars gains a robust view of customers to target segments with a high degree of personalization.
 
Recently, Loyalty360 was able to speak with Josh Margolis, Caesars Director of Online Loyalty Marketing, about some of the challenges and opportunities associated with engaging guests across “the largest and most rewarding entertainment network."
 
What does customer experience mean to Caesars?
 
Margolis: For Caesars, customer experience is the sum of every touch point that a customer has with the brand. So people will be interacting with us through billboards and acquisition channels or digital display banners, and any kind of communication, word of mouth included. When people make their way to our properties, we need to deliver on the brand promise that we have already made through those external communications. That includes things like our front desk interactions, making sure the ambiance is correct in hotel rooms, to make sure everything is exactly as they pictured it. When they visit, we want them to have the time of their life. And when they go home, we make sure to follow up in a targeted and segmented way. We ultimately want them to talk to their friends and family about us, to make them want to visit us as well.
                                                   
How do you understand what your customers find meaningful? Are there ways you measure success in this area?
 
Margolis: In terms of deciding how we are going to communicate with our customers, we do a lot of focus groups. We have a panel of people who are trusted customers, which is called our “Caesars Circle.” These are people who are more than happy to give us candid feedback. So that is one way, just in terms of our messaging.
 
We also do all kinds of customer surveys on the property. So anyone who has joined our Total Rewards loyalty program will get a survey. We take those surveys to heart. This process has definitely shifted the way we communicate.
 
We also hear a lot about alignment within the organization. Many brands talk about how customer experience is just a siloed or tiny part of the overall organizational culture, but how does Caesars approach this? How does CX fit within your organizational culture as a whole?
 
Margolis: We don’t have a specific department dedicated to customer experience. But it is in our organizational ethos. We are going to make sure that our customers have an incredible experience when they are with us. We are in the service industry, so it is really in our best interest to make sure that we make our guests feel special at every single touch point in their customer journey. And we are able to do that because we have such a robust loyalty database. We gather so much information when people come to our properties and, luckily, they are willing to share that with us because they trust our brands.
 
What are some of the biggest challenges that you face with listening to and surveying your customers, and with collecting feedback?
 
Margolis: Our biggest challenge is with noise in the data. A big component of our business is gaming, and so a big part of a guests’ experience can be dependent on a lot of factors. Let’s say someone comes to Caesar’s Palace, for instance. And that person is having the time of their life. The hotel room is on point, they go to the club and have the best time ever, the buffet is also great, but then they sit down at a table and they lose. That person might be in a terrible mood even though they had a phenomenal experience. So that kind of noise in the data can impact our ability to really know what’s going on with people.
 
That’s an interesting point. Is there anyway Caesars can filter that out?
 
Margolis: It’s tough. But I think it is a numbers game. The more data we can aggregate, the more we can filter out the noise. It all about the law of averages, and it is something we struggle with. We are in a business where people’s moods can fluctuate wildly and it is tough to get accurate data all the time. But we do the best with what we can get.
 
How is Caesars using social media? And how has this changed over the past 18 months or so?
 
Margolis: Social media is something that we leverage, and our team certainly is bigger today than it has been in the past. One thing we’ve done, which has been beneficial for us, has been to take our database - players who have signed up for the Total Rewards loyalty program - and start targeting them specifically through lookalike audiences. So those are not people we already know, but people who we will one day want to know. For example, if I already have a group of VIP players in our database, and we want to find more of them, we’ll take the profile of those VIP members and plug that into a customer audience third party provider. That will help us generate a list of people whose profile matches that of our VIP casino customer, and then we are able to target a wider audience more efficiently.
 
If you had a crystal ball, what is one thing that you would want to know from the competition?
 
Margolis: I would want to know what metrics they look at when deciding who their best customers are.  We have our own viewpoint of how we view our customers and the primary measure is gaming. Our industry is evolving, specifically in Los Vegas, which used to be a complete destination for gamers. People would only come here if they were a gambler at heart and eventually that changed. Now more of the city’s revenue is generated from hospitality offerings than it is from gaming itself.  I would like to know how our competitors value customers holistically because that is something we are continuing to improve our own ability to do.
 
Call out:
We don’t have a specific department dedicated to customer experience. But it is in our organizational ethos. We are going to make sure that our customers have an incredible experience when they are with us.
 
Summary:
Through a unique mix of omni-channel customer engagement, digital and social technology, and an extremely popular loyalty program known as Total Rewards, Caesars gains a robust view of customers to target segments with a high degree of personalization.
 
Shelf life:
One month
 

 

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