Article: Harrah’s Use of Business Intelligence Software to Improve Customer Loyalty and Operations

Harrah’s Entertainment, Inc. is the world’s largest gaming company having more than 80,000 employees. It operates several branded casino entertainment under the Harrah’s, Caesars, and Horseshoe brand names domestically and internationally. The company has grown through development of new properties, expansions, and acquisitions since it started in Reno, Nevada about 70 years ago. Harrah’s is committed to building loyalty and value with its customers through great service, operational excellence, and technical leadership. The need to attract and retain customers is critical to the success because customer loyalty can make or break a business. Harrah’s has succeeded in gathering data about its 40 million customers through its Total Rewards program that keeps track of guest gaming activities from restaurants to gaming tables and slot machines at any of its brand name casinos. It rewards guests and customer incentives through offering free room nights, free shows, free dining, and free gifts. Harrah’s already collects high volumes of transactions made by its customers. Harrah’s biggest challenge is to understand, analyze, and leverage raw data to maximize the lifetime value of their customers ultimately maximizing the return on investment, thus to better plan its strategic growth.

Harrah’s needed a system that could be managed from a central location and accessible from any of its properties and newly acquired companies. The solution needed to be user friendly for its corporate and property-level managers, and provide insights and analysis that could be applied to performance metrics at any of its properties.

As a result, the company chose to invest into Teradata and IBM Cognos Business Intelligence software to establish a closed-loop marketing system and to better achieve its marketing and customer loyalty and improve its business operations. Teradata is a single enterprise data warehouse and IBM Cognos business intelligence software allows users to drill further and deeper into customer data.
The company can now better profile and segment customers and use the data to develop targeted market strategies to drive customer behavior. For example, Harrah’s might reach out to customers who have not visited their property in more than six months and offer them incentives to bring them back to their favorite property. Through the use of IBM Cognos business intelligence solutions, managers can acquire detailed reporting and analysis capabilities that can be used to measure the effectiveness of new marketing campaigns against control groups. Specifically, the closed-loop system helps the organization with all aspects of the campaign such as indentifying and segmenting customers, implementing marketing strategies, tracking execution, documenting incentives, and measuring effectiveness.

Harrah’s has successfully deployed the IBM Cognos software from its corporate data center and provide access to the data from any property site. The intuitive interface made it easier for managers to interact with the software regardless of software experience. Thus, the company has developed standard marketing campaigns that drive activities for specific customer segments. Individual property managers can access these programs to determine which of the campaigns or combinations of campaigns can achieve their business operation goals for their specific location.

The implementation of this business intelligence software has resulted in a more focused communication and with customers, thus achieving better customer relationships. As a result of Harrah’s deployment of the system, customer spending has increased from 30 percent to nearly 50 percent. The outcome is that Harrah’s has cut down on employment costs by avoiding hiring new analyst on their properties. The centralized deployment strategy has made it easier for the company to identify new locations and support future growth and acquisitions. Harrah’s now has the ability to analyze historical data to predicting future performance of its marketing campaigns, which is a critical factor in sustaining a competitive market advantage.

Reference: IBM Case Study, Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., 27 February 2009.
Website: http://www-01.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/cs/LWIS-7PNLEC?OpenDocument&Site=cognos&cty=en_us