Harrah's CRM leaves nothing to chance 

In the world of casino gaming, data is the key to customer service. And in the world of casino data, Harrah's Entertainment is the key master. The company operates more than 36,000 slot machines, 2,000-plus gaming tables, 100 restaurants and more than 11,000 hotel rooms on 21 properties in 17 different markets under the Harrah's, Rio and Showboat names. To differentiate itself from other casinos, Harrah's developed a customer-relationship management strategy that has set the standard in the industry and positioned the company on Forbes' platinum list of the top 400 best performing companies.

At the core of this strategy is the Harrah's award-winning Total Rewards program, which helps the company maintain an edge in a highly competitive industry. And the highlight of the program is the Total Gold customer loyalty card, which tracks casino visitors' playing habits', hhow often they visit, what they play and how much they spend at any of the company's properties.

Harrah's uses this information to target marketing campaigns to individual customers' preferences and reward their loyalty with complimentary products and services. The program takes the best CRM practices and pairs them with a Teradata Data Warehouse.

The program, launched in 1997, grew quickly, but Harrah's reached a 
performance plateau with its previous data warehouse solution,which 
was a non-Teradata RDBMS running on NCR hardware. A visit to NCR's Benchmark Center helped Harrah's reduce a set of 100 sample queries from 30 hours to 10 hours. But a parallel test run on Teradata whittled down the processing time to only an hour.

Harrah's began with detailed customer information, rather than processing other data to generate it, an unusual but effective approach to enterprise data warehousing. The company's experience convinced it that the flexible Teradata solution, which allowed Harrah's to develop its own methodology and grow the system in the future, was the answer to its data warehousing needs.

Harrah's established a Governance Team to lead the warehouse by establishing priorities, providing corporate-level initiatives, determining service levels and review methodologies, identifying the total cost of ownership and reporting the return on investment. The results have been astounding. In the central region alone, new customer visits have increased by as much as 15% per month, and repeat visits have risen from 1.2 to 1.9 visits per month. A CRM campaign program at the Tunica, Miss., casino more than doubled the profitability of each customer. And overall, the number of customers visiting different Harrah's properties grew by 72% in 1999, leading to a bottom-line increase of more than $50 million.

The company's 1999 annual report sums up its experience: "Our success was no accident. Our strategy was to capitalize on the information we've assembled in creating the gaming industry's most detailed player database to develop leading-edge marketing programs that enhance customer loyalty. This enabled us to strengthen our position as the best consumer-marketing company in the gaming business."

 Deborah J. Smith, senior consultant, Teradata