When you are writing your Casino Host Goals, you are really answering the fundamental question “Why do we have a Player Development team?”

The Property is making a significant investment in salaries, benefits, and also in any Comps and VIP parties and gifts. So why do we invest in these professionals, and what do we want as a financial return?

As an interesting exercise, go ahead and ask this question of the managers of the different departments: “What are we trying to achieve by having a Player Development team? What do we expect from them?”

The various answers that you receive will reinforce the reality that the team has a wide range of responsibilities from reactive customer service to proactive sales.

For example:

• General Manager – bring in the best players as often as possible and keep them happy while they are playing. Find out who’s not  playing and get them back on property.
• VP Marketing  – get the best players into the Events, run the Events, manage the ticket allocation at concerts, and entertain the guests at Promotions and VIP parties.
• Guest Services Manager- take care of customer services issues with the most important players, and
• CFO – manage investment of Comps and expense, so we don’t ‘buy the business’

This is a wide range of responsibilities. And we can immediately see that it’s not obvious how a Player Development professional should divide their time between these different activities.

Some are reactive – Who’s here? What do they need? Some are proactive – Who’s not here? Who should I call?

We set goals for the PD team so they know how to balance their time between activities to meet their Active, Inactive, Acquisition, Retention, Profitability, and Contact goals.

But perhaps we should also consider eliminating tasks that distract from their goals? Maybe increase the focus on Who’s Not Here, and ask other teams to manage who is here. If this resonates with you, then take a look at the 6 Tasks You Shouldn’t Find on a Casino Host Job Description

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As managers, we set goals so that employees are crystal clear on their priorities and how to allocate their time.

If you talk to your Hosts, you will find that they face a daily dilemma regarding how to divide their time between re-acting to guests who are on-property and proactively reaching out to players who could or should or would have been playing.

Especially if Executive Management voices the opinion that “Hosts should be on the gaming floor and not in their office on the phone”.

The Player Development Executives and Casino Hosts continue to have, an important role in providing superior customer service for the very best players when they are on-property.

We can think of this as ‘reactive’ behavior where the Player Development team react to the demands and desires of existing customers who have been identified as ‘valuable’ to the Casino and ‘coded’ to the Host by a Manager.

But the gaming industry has become extremely competitive, and so Executive Management also requires the Hosts to focus on strategies that will:

• Attract and retain new valuable players,
• Maintain and grow existing players, and
• Re-activate players that have disappeared or declined.

In order to attract, maintain, grow, and re-activate players, the Hosts need to take a proactive approach to monitoring and influencing the behavior of their guests.

In particular, the Hosts need to find out who is not here but should be and reach out to those players to find out what is happening in their personal lives; are they unhappy with a service issue at your Casino, have their financial circumstances changed, or have they been attracted to the competition?

(You may need to invest in soft-skills training because not every Host that can successfully react to a customer standing in front of them, has the ability to proactively reach out via a ‘cold-call’ and find out, over the phone, why a guest has not played as often or with as high an ADT as before.)

The point is that we need the Player Development (PD) team to balance reactive customer service skills with proactive sales skills; and setting Host Goals is the way to drive this behavior.

By designing a set of goals that measure all of these different efforts and results, you create a framework that enables the Hosts to correctly spread their time and energies across this range of challenges.

In particular, it will help to balance time spent on the gaming floor reacting to guests who are here, with time spent in the office ‘developing’ players who are not here.

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Read this book, Casino Host Goals, and you will have a road-map for success as you create or improve your Player Development program, in the context of your Casino Marketing strategy. It belongs on the shelf of any Executive in Casino Management who wants to drive revenue from a strategic approach to PD. Just $21 from Amazon.

You will implement a financial bonus program for some of the goals, especially the goals that are designed to generate extra revenue from additional trips and play, but don’t rush into this approach.

Implement the goals without a financial bonus and monitor the situation for a quarter. You may find that either the Hosts find it impossible to meet the goals because you have set the bar too high, or that the Hosts achieve 200% of goal because you have set the bar too low. Once you are confident that you can predict the results then you can introduce financial bonuses.

You must put a cap on the bonus amount. Don’t offer x% of increased Theo without a limit on the amount! They can blow past the goal if you did not set it at a high enough level. And no-one wants to explain that large bonus check to the GM.

The Finance department can definitely help to design the bonus scheme by creating different ‘models’ or scenarios of what might happen, so ask the CFO for some help from the Finance team.

Bonus checks are important but they are not the only form of recognition. You might provide bonus checks for goals that drive revenue, and use other forms of positive feedback for goals such as ‘making regular contact with guests’. This can include a personal note, acknowledgement in a team meeting, or a free pizza lunch if the team meets their team goal for the month!

It is a good idea to design a staggered bonus scheme so the Host gets an increasing reward for being at 100%, 105%, 110% or more of the goal. (You might even provide a small bonus at 95% so they don’t give up.)

And you want to pay a team bonus, on at least one of the team goals, so the Hosts have a real incentive to work together and to lift each other’s performance.

Click here for more Management Articles.

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Read this book, Casino Host Goals, and you will have a road-map for success as you create or improve your Player Development program, in the context of your Casino Marketing strategy. It belongs on the shelf of any Executive in Casino Management who wants to drive revenue from a strategic approach to PD. Just $21 from Amazon.

Why Set Goals?

As managers, we understand that the Player Development Executives and Casino Hosts have an important role in customer service for the very best players, but we also need the team to focus on strategies that will attract new valuable players, retain existing players, and reactivate players that have disappeared or declined.

By designing a set of goals that measure all of these different efforts and results, you create a framework that enables the PD team to correctly spread their time and energies across this range of challenges.

It’s a Lot of Work!

It takes a lot of work to introduce Host Goals. The Director of Player Development can take the lead but there needs to be collaboration across Player Development, Finance, HR, and IT. The GM should pay close attention and provide the final sign-off.

• The Finance department can help with modeling ‘what might happen to the bottom line’ if the Hosts meet their goals, and can also help with ‘what might it cost’ if you are going to add a bonus to the base salary for the team members.
• HR can advise on the ‘softer side’ of how to communicate and roll-out the program in a positive way.
• And you need to keep IT involved throughout the planning process to make sure that IT can provide daily reports that will let you, and each Host, know the ‘pace’ i.e. exactly where they stand against their goals. Do not underestimate the amount of reporting needed from IT (unless you pick a vendor!).

It Takes a Long Time!

It will take at least three months to define the goals and obtain sign off from the General Manager. In parallel, it can take six to nine months to pick a vendor, obtain approval for the contract, go through the Gaming Authority, and stand up the solution.

Don’t wait for the funding. If you are serious then you should immediately start to design your goals, and look around for consultants and vendors.

By the time the funding is available in January, you should have written your goals, decided on a vendor, chosen a trainer, and be ready to tell them ‘Yes!’. It will then take the first quarter to get through the gaming authority, stand up the solution, and train your team, so you will be up and running for the start of the second quarter.

If you hope to introduce goals at the start of next year, then you need to start now. It is almost too late! So do your homework and ensure the budget for next year includes consulting, training, a Host contact management system, and any expenses for IT

Click here for more Management Articles.

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Read this book, Casino Host Goals, and you will have a road-map for success as you create or improve your Player Development program, in the context of your Casino Marketing strategy. It belongs on the shelf of any Executive in Casino Management who wants to drive revenue from a strategic approach to PD. Just $21 from Amazon.

Is your host team doing everything it should be to secure (as best they can) the loyalty of your patrons? There is quite possibly something more that can be done to ensure the continued visitation of your Players of Interest.

My experience, as well as the thoughts of many experts in the industry, have led me to believe that lots of hosts spend too much time on retaining players who have already demonstrated their loyalty to your casino. Many of your high frequency patrons know folks in every department and come in with treats and trinkets for lots of your associates. While they certainly need to be able to depend on your property’s premiere customer service team from time to time, it’s important to ensure that these players don’t take up too much of the of the host team’s time. Why? Because your property’s premiere customer service team should also be (1) finding out why good players have not visited recently and (2) getting new members of worth to return. In fact, there is probably more opportunity for increased revenue from the acquisition and reactivation functions your host team performs.

While competitors right-size, my money’s on spending time building relationships with your players of interest on an ongoing basis. Certainly every employee should be doing this whenever possible, this is a task perfectly aligned with what a PD team is supposed to do. These components of a successful Casino Player Development program are critical to its continued success. Ensuring that you hit all these points and hold your hosts accountable for them should result in continued profitability from your PD team.

Identification
Identifying these particular “players of interest” to your property is the fist step. Taking a somewhat granular look at your database will help you identify the new and at-risk players in your database who present the most opportunity for you in terms of long-term loyalty to your operation. It’s not difficult if you have the right tools and someone to ask the right questions. Where do our most profitable customers live? From where are our most promising new club members coming? When do the players of interest come to the casino? How often? Are there times when they don’t visit? Or do they sometimes come in and play less (or better yet, more)? Are there fight zones with competitors where profitable players are equidistant to you and another property? Are any of those patrons at risk of defection? What can you do to keep them from visiting the other casino? If they decide to stray, how will you get them back?

Planning
Once you know who you’re going after, decide on your plan. There will certainly be mail components and, if you’re really on your game, some form of digital marketing as well. But we’re talking about critical components of PD here. Ensuring that the hosts know who they need to reach out to and with what offer(s), if any, is the most critical component at this stage. The players of interest have been identified, and now the hosts have to do their stuff. Phone calls and handwritten notes and greeting cards and gift baskets delivered to hotel rooms, reservations at spas and golf tee times, steakhouse dinner parties and special gifts are all examples of critical components the hosts may bring to sweeten the deal to bring back even reluctant players of promising worth. Sometimes you have to be armed as though for battle, particularly in increasingly crowded regional gaming markets.

Acquisition
As a baseline, new players need to make 3 trips in order for a casino to recoup its reinvestment and turn that new player into a profitable one. Ideally, the patron will return twice more within 30 days. While an aggressive new player incentive and generous mail offers combine to increase the odds that a new patron will return, for those who play to a higher level there is nothing as effective as a personal “touch” from a casino host to provide an incentive to come back right away. In this capacity, the host becomes the new player’s “touchpoint,” or his “inside man,” so to speak. When the host offers to make a reservation or some other consideration for the player, he feels important and is more likely to return to the casino whose host made him feel this way. A personal connection is certainly a host’s strength, and this connection begins the journey by which a player can find his “home” casino. The patron may well return sooner than he might have if he’d only received a mailer.

Reactivation
For players who have gone quiet and haven’t returned in a while, a host may be the most effective method for getting that return trip. While a robust mail program targeted at reactivation can have a great response rate, having the hosts call the top levels of guests in that mailing can certainly provide a profitable boost to the results. Some of the players who receive your Where have you been? mailer will appreciate the opportunity to tell someone why they haven’t returned, as many of them are just looking for a reason to feel valued enough by your property to come back. A host can deliver the personalized experience that these players (rightly) feel they deserve. I’ve seen players who remember a host (“Oh, Bobby! Hi!”) return within two weeks of a “personal” call…at a rate of about 30%. (The host I’m referencing marveled at how effective simply calling and asking how people were doing really was in getting them to make a visit to see him.)

Retention
While I believe that many hosts spend too much time in this role, it’s still a vital part of the work they do to ensure your property has patrons coming through the doors with regularity. Divided equally, a host should spend roughly 30% of his or her time in contact with familiar faces, guests you know you’ll see on a predictable basis, and recognizing when those patrons are off their visitation and/or play pattern. As always, balance is key…and retention is a function that is necessary to maintain your expected levels of activity and revenue from these dependable patrons.

Analysis
Sometimes you’ll have to change direction, as markets change and people move on for one reason or another. New challenges will always be ahead, so having the ability to spot trends and apply the principles of preemptive reactivation, particularly when paired up with a robust view of your database, all combine to provide you with the ability to find a new path almost as quickly as your favorite GPS app. See what happens, keep identifying patrons who deserve host attention for whatever reason, and look for ways to stay ahead of the game using analytics.

Tracking
It’s important that you have a clear view of your host team’s productivity. When you assign new or inactive patrons to your hosts for contact, you may want to include a qualifier for the hosts to achieve before they can “claim” the patrons in question. Perhaps you will set a threshold for theo and a number of return visits so the hosts can have the players coded and see the benefits (extra theo toward my goal!) of bringing those players back. See who they’re contacting, what the conversion rate is, and how much they’re adding to your overall reinvestment in the way of comps and other freebies. Review this information at least once a week. Daily is better. Use your tracking data to keep each individual host on track throughout the goal period.

Measurement
Now that you’ve honed your identification and targeting skills, it’s time to see how well your plans have worked. The tools you use to locate your players of interest should be of use in determining your success rate as well. How many new players in which areas did we convert to our monthly mail program? Are they visiting us with regularity, and is there a pattern in the play that indicates we may be able to get more of their gaming wallet? What offers move them? Which ones do they ignore? Will something else work?

And repeat. If you’re not sure you have the resources to pull off the identification, analysis or measurement components, let us know. Harvest Trends is continuously refining its tools for casino marketers…we may have just what you need.

Did I forget anything? Are there critical components in your PD program that we didn’t list here? Please sound off in the comments below.

When you’re looking at your player list trying to come up with ways to engage your patrons and get them to make a return trip soon, planning something with a broad appeal might seem like the way to go. But in reality, many players whose patronage warrants invitations to exclusive events are looking for a little special treatment. There’s not likely to be any single event you can do which will appeal to everyone you’d like to reactivate, for example. (Think of the invitees as the individuals they really are, and you’ll quickly see why.) This means that having a variety of event types in your repertoire is a good idea. Here are few to consider.

The Friendly Competition Team up with another host at your property and decide what sort of competition you want to have. Ham it up and go with armwrestling or a video game showdown; cheese it up with a craft-making competition or an online silly selfie contest; heck, you could even do a spelling bee. Involve the whole host team or even invite others. Feeling bold? Team up with players. Whatever you decide, make it something compelling to watch. Then set the stakes for the contest. You could have the “loser” host shave his head (set the shave date in the future and maybe drive two trips). How about a parade through the casino for the winner, complete with loud music, balloons, and a handout of some kind for the guests on their route? Again, make the stakes and the spectacle worth watching. You can do prizes for patrons in attendance if you like, too.

VIP/Executive Roundtable Guests love to interact with executives when they can. High-end guests feel as though their patronage should give them a seat at the table, so why not give them one? Light hors d’ouvres, light cocktails, and round tables surrounded by comfortable seating set the stage for a dialogue that will make your players feel important and provide insights to your executives. (Especially effective if Ops Execs participate!) Just remember, make no promises and always be sincere.

Paint & Sip Appeal to the artistic and/or wine lovers on your player list and do a fun, reasonably- priced relationship-building event. The host should be painting and sipping too for the record, to share in the experience and give everyone the same opportunity for praise and encouragement. A friend of mine did one of these and felt as though this event would work again and again. Handpick small groups and keep the atmosphere mellow.

Spa Day/Massage Therapy Do you have players who own their own businesses or who are raising kids? These folks migh not take adequate time to recharge unless encouraged to do so, so provide them a good reason. If your property doesn’t already have a spa, talk with those around you and work out an equitable way to provide the service to your patrons. Setting up on property is preferable, but you could add a fun element if you have to “road trip” your guests to an off-property pampering.

Hometown/Region Celebration This could take many forms, but is based on bringing in patrons from a particular geographical area while appealing to hometown pride. Invite only those from your target area and encourage them to bring a friend if they like. Feature decorations that emphasize the unique qualities of the area, serve local favorite foods, play music about or from the region…you get the idea.

Plus, Bonus Tips! To make every event a success, there are a few things to consider throughout the process:

• Harness the power of social media. Tweet, post, blog, stream, and share before, during, and after to maximize engagement. Tag your guests! (If you haven’t already, consider – within company rules, of course – setting up profiles for use only with guests to share directly with them… keeping your personal accounts “private”)
• Ask for feedback. Give your guests a score card or link to an onlie survey asking what they thought or for ideas for future events to ensure you’re hitting all the high spots. I’ll bet you will get some great stuff from this!
• Include others. Ask co-workers to team up with you, invite the chef to talk about the food, have executives stop in, and encourage patrons to invite friends when appropriate. Many years ago, we invited one of our patrons (who also owned a nursery) to do a VIP presentation on preparing your garden for winter. We got lots of brownie points for that one!
• Build relationships. Use people’s names, show appreciation, introduce guests to one another, and share the stories that keep them laughing. This will pay dividends in the form of stronger bonds between co-workers and yourself, between guests and associates, and among the guests themselves.
• Get creative! Anyone who’s been in or around the casino business for very long knows that we recycle a lot of the same events. (Or do a “tribute” to competitor’s successful event.) Come up with ways to keep things fresh: do a fun theme, switch up the details (think middle 25 scores win the tournament), or combine elements from more than one event.
• Remember to have fun! Ultimately, your guests return to your property because it’s an entertainment experience. Don’t let them see you sweat if things go awry, resolve that the show must go on, and have fun with it. No matter what.