How to help your hosts focus on players on the rise
Staying connected to lower value players the smart way
Carter Buck
Every day, Player Development departments are faced with deciding how to best use the time and talent of their Host team. After all, the purpose of a Host is to engage with players to build trust, establish brand value, create lasting relationships and ultimately drive more business for their property. However, we can all agree that not all tasks that Hosts perform are created equal.
Here’s what I mean – would you rather have your Host spend time on the casino floor with a player who averages $10,000 in table games win per month or, say, spend time with a player that is on the threshold of giving more theoretical or generating a few more trips per month, rather than spending time on the phone calling players who average $200 in slot play per month? Which would you choose?
Smart money says that you’re spending the time cultivating the relationship with the higher value player and those players that are on the rise to their optimum potential. Fellow Raving Partner, Nicole Barker, talks about having your “player development efforts concentrate on the “sweet spot” : the segment of players who contribute a greater percentage in worth than the size of their cohort.” It’s not to say that investing in lower value players is a bad use of time and resources, but when a Host has only a certain number of hours in a day to give, their efforts should be focused on the higher value targets.
In economic terms, a Host who spends too much time with lower value targets is subject to the Law of Diminishing Returns. In other words, the benefit gained by working with lower level targets is less than the amount of money you spend to work with them.
By necessity, casinos draw an imaginary line in their player segments to determine the lowest value player that a Host should be proactively engaging. For some it is $500 in ADP, for others it’s $5,000 in ADP. Wherever the line is drawn, it’s safe to say that all players below the line will be receiving a piece of direct mail or an email instead of a personalized phone call from the Host – even though a personalized phone call is proven to increase response rates by nearly 600X.
So, how do you continue to drive an elevated response rate while not increasing the demand on your hosting staff?
That’s the question that many of our customers ask right before reaching out to us. As a call center partner to the casino industry, we become a seamless extension of the Host team – focused on reaching the lower value segment of players who fall below the line. There are a ton of reasons why it makes sense to implement a strategy like this – here are just a few:
- Maintain a consistent communications strategy with all levels of players
- Extract more revenue from your lowest value segment
- Reduce your overall engagement cost
A question we often get is, “Which activities can be handled by a call center partner?”
Here are a few to consider:
- Making outbound phone calls to deliver special offers
- Making outbound “welcome calls” to all new rewards club members
- Making outbound calls that focus on “declining” players
- Making outbound calls that invite “inactive” players to come into the casino
- Receiving inbound phone calls to RSVP for special events (slot tournaments, etc.)
- Receiving inbound phone calls to RSVP for your hotel
- Making outbound calls for hotel RSVPs on slow weeks to increase your fill rates
Regardless of which call vendor you may choose to work with, utilizing the right partner will help to solve one of the biggest challenges in a PD department – keeping your hosts focused on the higher value opportunities without compromising everyone else.
