Welcome back to this new edition of Apac CIO Outlook !!!✖
DECEMBER 20249 Keeping it CleanOur community, which of course includes our Team Members and guests, is more cautious now when it comes to the surfaces we touch throughout a given day, and casinos have a lot of surfaces. When we worked to create a safe and socially distanced environment during the pandemic, we employed technology from our gaming partner Aristocrat that enabled automated shut down of certain slot machines while keeping others online, ensuring proper social distancing between games. The system also sent alerts when machines needed to be wiped down to guarantee consistent cleaning and disinfecting. This was certainly labor-intensive, but clearly appreciated by our guests as was evidenced in survey feedback.Protecting the HouseThe same tools that support mobile ordering and payment, streamlining the experience for both Team Members and guests, can also support loss prevention. When a casino becomes significantly less cash flow-heavy due to increased use of mobile wallets, fewer people collect cash from the cage, creating fewer opportunities for that cash to be stolen. Mobile transactions can also reduce reliance on the heavily regulated count room, ultimately ensuring lower risk of cash loss and lower operational costs for the property.How do we do it? When it comes to evaluating new technologies, our process emphasizes two key factors. The first is always going to be the guest experience. We bring together managers across the organization to discuss where customer pain points may be and how technology can address those issues. Sometimes it starts with the tech and evolves to a use case. The second is our offerings, because we want our guests to love our product. Technology helps us enhance the research we do in our lab by creating a full end-to-end environment giving us live insights into new products without exposing them to the customer base prematurely.Measuring the contributions of new technologies helps define steps for ongoing improvement and effectively showcases return on investment. Our analytics team at Live! Casinos & Hotels develops tools to help decision makers carefully analyze data to improve our understanding of how guests are using our products, how often they visit the property, and what trends they're following. These insights help us provide them with an even better and more personalized experience. To know if we're being successful, we must compare results against our KPIs. Retention, profit, slot play versus table games all plays into this.This data can drive everything from floor reconfiguration to restaurant menus to staffing levels on different days of the week, all helping us improve the experience while keeping costs in line.Technological advancements in the travel and hospitality industry are evolving constantly. Keeping up with the latest offerings is daunting and evaluating the options can seem like an endless task. Companies that identify and prioritize what matters to them for us, it is customer experience and product quality are well equipped to overcome those concerns by focusing their efforts and evaluating true measures of success. And sometimes the key to that success is not the latest experimental technology, but leading-edge systems from well-vetted vendors that stand the test of time. MEASURING THE CONTRIBUTIONS OF NEW TECHNOLOGIES HELPS DEFINE STEPS FOR ONGOING IMPROVEMENT AND EFFECTIVELY SHOWCASES RETURN ON INVESTMENT < Page 8 | Page 10 >