Dynamic duo Tracy Austin, left, and Monica Tyson tap their passion for data to build a customer-loyalty 
program that deals in profits.

Harrah's Marketing Workbench data warehouse runs on the following hardware and software:

 ï Teradata
 ï NCR WorldMark 4800
 ï CognosImpromptu
 ï SAS 

It's in the cards 

Harrah's trumps competitors with a winning CRM hand

by Lisa E. Davis

It doesn't have pirate ships, roller coasters or the Eiffel Tower adorning its casinos, but Harrah's Entertainment has found another way to distinguish itself from the rest of the gaming industry. It has developed a high-tech approach to building and nurturing customer relationships-anchored by a Teradata data warehouse. 

Through its Total Rewards customer-loyalty program, Harrah's tracks customers' visits, the games they play, the shows they see and how much they spend, and even predicts how much they're likely to spend in the future. That allows the Las Vegas-based company, which operates 21 casinos across the country, to better target its marketing and comps. And that helps keep customers loyal to Harrah's casinos wherever they go, from Las Vegas to Vicksburg, Miss.

Harrah's IT efforts have attracted much press and won a host of awards, including the top spot on InformationWeek's "Innovation 100: The Customer" and CIO's 2001 Enterprise Value Award. Behind Harrah's lauded data warehousing system are two determined and innovative women-Monica Tyson, Harrah's IT development director, and her boss, Tracy Austin, vice president of IT development. Here they discuss their winning hand.

Q: How does Total Rewards work?

Tracy: Let's start with mirroring it to an airline frequency program - something everyone is usually familiar with. Airlines award you with miles earned that translate into tailored levels of service by tier (gold, silver, etc.) or flight awards or upgrades you can "purchase" with your miles. After your trip, you get your rewards, or miles, earned for that trip. And after your trip, you can use those rewards. Total Rewards is a loyalty-based player recognition program. It differs in many ways from airline programs. Key is the fact that we don't wait to tell you what you've earned when you are at home-we tell you in real time, any time, at any one of our 21 properties. You can also use your rewards as you earn them, not after your trip or visit with Harrah's has ended.

Total Rewards targets the gaming customer who is what we call in our lingo "cross-market." That means if they play in Chicago with a Total Rewards card and go to Las Vegas, they should come to one of our two properties in Las Vegas and benefit from Total Rewards earned in Chicago and Las Vegas. That's the idea. A property has a system that is linked to all slot machines. You insert your Total Rewards card; it checks the local casino management system. If we don't know who you are locally, the system checks the central database, gathers your information and rewards or recognizes you-usually in under 20 seconds. That's what happens on the casino floor. Back at the office-all the analysis, mailings and predicting potential value for customers-all of that happens on Marketing Workbench (MWB) on our Teradata system.

Q: How many people from Harrah's were on the team that put the Total Rewards program together?

Tracy: I had the opportunity to lead that initiative in 1997. I was given a deadline of 12 months. I had a geographically dispersed IT team working across four platforms at all the properties-I think we had 11 at the time. On the business side at each property, and at corporate, we had many different Total Gold card-center managers and marketing. So I would say about 150 people (were involved).

Q: What was Harrah's warehousing capacity back in 1997?

Tracy: We've gotten a lot of press about having this great warehouse. The reality was, Marketing Workbench (MWB) was an afterthought, a way to separate decision support from the OLTP database. MWB was fed by the OLTP database and built for mail and analytical query so we didn't mess up the OLTP system.

MWB broke rules of data warehousing. We had more detail data stored on the OLTP, and we originally planned to roll out independent data marts. Our requirements from initial design to implementation in terms of volume, types of data-all turned out to have changed pretty dramatically. But we rolled it out anyway because we had a deadline (Laughing). Seriously, we had a good concept/product-but things change, and you learn as you go. You have to move forward. Then Monica got the chance to fix it (Still laughing but very serious).

Q: That's when you went to Teradata for benchmark testing?

Monica: Yes, we were actually running another database on NCR hardware. Tracy was talking about the original design being separate data marts, but we never built that. Somebody realized if we had the data centralized we could always break it out by property, but it would be hard to go the other way. So the  initial version of Marketing Workbench was truly a small data warehouse. We had all the information from all the properties. The problem was, it just wasn't working from a performance perspective. We were in production, but it was just so painful. This was the spring of '98 and we were looking to optimize the system better, so we went to the benchmark center in Rancho Bernardo for testing. I'm not sure who had the foresight to say, "While we have your data here, would you mind if we convert it to Teradata and run a few tests to see what would happen?" We agreed, and so the Teradata tests were run as well.

Q: What was the result?

Monica: I was not personally at the benchmark center. Our guys called me up and said, "You are not going to believe this. These queries are running on Teradata-the whole set of them." Our benchmark consisted of a set of 100 queries that would not even finish on the current box. My response back to the guys was, "So I guess we know what the solution to our performance issues is, don't we?" But this is easier to say than to do. We had just put the system in production in December 1997, and now it is the spring 
of '98 and we wanted to throw it away.

Tracy: So what did we do? We went back to our capital committee to request funding. We had rolled out MWB to the field and had an install base that was only six months old. It was hard to explain that our basic platform needed to be addressed given the money we had just spent and wanted 
to spend.

I need to point out something that Teradata did at that juncture that made it easy to sell. Teradata was willing to put in our contract that our query performance would increase by "X" or they would fix it. Teradata put it in writing. Teradata put its money where its mouth was. That says a lot about standing behind your product and knowing what your product will and will not do. It made the job of requesting this funding a lot easier.

Q: Did the conversion go smoothly?

Monica: The conversion went really smoothly. We put together a project management team that included a Teradata Professional Services project manager and one of our managers and ran it as one team. Our NCR hardware got delivered in October 1999, and the system was up, running and parallel by the first of January. We then went through a data conversion and cleanup phase. We began migration of the users from one box to the other in February. We unplugged the older box by the end of March, so in total from hardware delivery to the end was only six months.

Tracy: It was a huge conversion for us. And a huge learning curve.

Monica: We just converted it. We did not rewrite the system. We did not rewrite the feeds. We just converted it over to Teradata tools. In September 1998, we were using Business Objects, and in September 1999, we were Cognos Impromptu on Teradata. So in one year's time we just totally changed out the architecture. It's when we finally got Teradata that we had the performance and capacity to handle what marketing wanted to do. It finally let them see their vision to completion.

Tracy: We had a better understanding of what a warehouse was really about. That's a big benefit of Partners (the assistance program) and user group stuff: You find out what other people are doing who are leaders, and you get great ideas from different industries. If we were to just focus on the model of what the gaming industry does, we would never be different. If businesses think they can catch up in six months and implement a system like ours, they don't know what they are talking about. This system is not just about technology. It's about customers, organizational culture, leadership, smart knowledge workers, and distribution and product pricing strategies, and finally, having the right technology to execute against.

Q: Has any other casino company built a system on the scale you have?

Tracy: They are trying to, but the model has always been decentralized, property-centric systems. And the pain that you go through-not just technology, that's a piece of cake-but culturally, to get your management to share their data and collapse it, takes more than the technical implementation. I see some of the Las Vegas properties starting to go there, but one might ask about their distribution strategy. Gaming licenses for the most part have been handed out. And the industry is continuing to go through mergers. 

The other thing I think is key is that we cannot rest on our laurels, and that is why the first initiative that Monica and I pushed for was to add product data to the customer information in the warehouse. Nobody is going to be able to catch up with that for quite some time.

Q: What is the relationship of IT and marketing? 

Monica: The marketing cycle starts with the warehouse. Marketing can do ad hoc queries to meet any sort of fluctuating demand at a property-if they have a show that's not selling out or they need to do a midweek event, for example. All the properties have the capability to respond to their market.

In addition, our corporate marketing group has put together some very scientific or decision-science-based marketing programs as well. They'll customize messages based on (market) segment. They segment it in lots of different ways. For example, you normally visit Vegas twice a year, and you are within the window when you are due back. Maybe I'll send you a nice offer saying, "Welcome back, this is what's going on in Vegas."

These corporate marketing programs are written in Cognos Impromptu. Basically what they are is a black-box way for each property to take a lot of information, funnel it through and generate lists of guests to market to for a particular campaign. And then they use our internal offers system, which tracks what coupon, what collateral, what they were offered.

Tracy: - what works and what doesn't work.

Monica: And that's fed back to the warehouse; so then all the analytics are done. The same corporate group has a whole series of analytics to see how effective the different campaigns are over time. So the marketing cycle begins and ends with the warehouse-enabling what we call the closed-loop marketing. The online system is important because it is what is providing all the data. It's providing all the customer activity, the trip information, the hotel stays, etc. But from the marketing perspective, the value of the warehouse is the analytics. It allows them to use complex queries to determine who to market to and then to judge the success and make changes to the models and campaigns. 

Q: How do you relate with Teradata?

Monica: One of the things over the last two and a half years as a Teradata customer that has really helped us is the partnership-the way Teradata folks are willing to sit and discuss. They know their tools and are willing to help us think through how we can put them to better use without saying, "You've got to do it this way." It's helping us move forward by just being part of our team. We use our account team to death. We've taken advantage of the Partners program and the other Teradata customers as well.

Tracy: This time last year I was 32 people short, given the projects that I knew about, so the only way you deal with that is by (using) a lot of creative sourcing. That takes a different skill set with your IT management team, and it also takes very special sourcing partners.

In the last year, I spent twice as much on IT development as we ever had before, which was a huge amount for our company. We did a lot of co-sourcing. What I learned this year is that not all business relationships are created equal, and that it's not always the fault of the business partner outside of Harrah's by a long shot. What I keep doing is analyzing the Teradata relationship and using that as my best demonstrated practice. In Harrah's Teradata is a synonym for partnership.

Q: Let's talk about your backgrounds.

Tracy: I accidentally fell into computers. I had a job (in college) where I posted jobs that came in from employers for college students to apply for. IBM called up and said they had a summer job, so before I posted it for other people to apply, I ran down there-. That's where I started in systems. After I graduated from college, they hired me into sales. I hated sales, so I went the system-engineer path. I left IBM after five years because I wanted to work for a smaller company where I thought I could make a difference. That was Harrah's.

Monica: Out of college, I worked for Harris Corporation. My first job was in the information center. I helped users write queries on the mainframe. Then I went over to the PC environment and supported the end-user applications. I joined Harrah's as the product manager for basically all the Microsoft products. In 1997 I began working within the customer products area and in particular with Marketing Workbench.

Q: I've heard you described as a dynamic duo. How do you work together?

Tracy: Monica is based in Memphis, and I am in Las Vegas. She runs very independently, and so do I. So we don't see each other a lot. The underlying thing is we both have this incredible passion for doing a warehouse-truly doing a warehouse-and that started probably the first time we came to Ranch Bernardo, which was early '98. I didn't realize both Monica and I had worked for an information center before. The whole concept behind an information center is building the plumbing or the capability for the user to move forward and advance the business. If you think about it, that is what warehousing is all about. So it's kind of funny to me. We both started from the same point. Now it just clicked for me why we have this passion.

Monica: I think we have a shared mindset. I laughed when you said dynamic duo, because I think other people would say we have outgoing personalities.

Tracy: (Laughing) "Pushy women," "outgoing"-I've heard all of them a thousand times.

Q: What advice would you offer young women who are pursuing a career in information technology?

Tracy: The best thing to do is forget the fact that you are a woman and go and do and be. Do not try to be a man. Be your own talented, passionate, integrous and skilled self. The second thing is, it's great to know the technology, but you better know what business you are in, because that's where you are going to make your mark - linking and driving the technology to profitable business leaps. T

Lisa E. Davis is a freelance writer who specializes in executive profiles.

Teradata Magazine - Q1 2001