Harrah’s Entertainment| Tim Stanley

Harrah’s Entertainment CIO, Tim Stanley talks about his high-tech vision for attracting customers to the world’s most popular casino destinations, from deploying wireless gadgets to implementing business intelligence software.

Dan Farber: Harrah’s is one of the largest casino entertainment companies in the world. What is the size and the scope of the operation under your command?

Tim Stanley: Harrah’s is now the world’s largest gaming entertainment provider. We operate about fifty casino hotel entertainment properties now around the world. Pretty heavily focused in the North America, United States, from certainly Nevada where everyone thinks about all the way up to New Jersey into Canada and even a South American operation now. And in the end of last year we actually acquired and now operate the London Clubs International properties in and around London and several developments underway in Scotland and South Africa and the like.

DF: Now I have been to a number of casinos I have to admit. Certainly the one thing that really stands out is that there are masses of people trying to have a good time and that as a company obviously that whole customer relationship management issue has to be the most significant thing you work on.

TS: It is our bread and butter it is; it’s really what we pride ourselves on. We actually have over 100 million guests that join and visit us each and every year from around the world. And our whole goal for many years and we continue to focus it is trying to create individual and unique experiences for those customers.

DF: That really sounds complex so what’s behind all the technology that you are using to deliver those kinds of personalised experiences?

TS: Well there’s as many systems and complex things like that. There are systems of systems but the core of it is really around the customer and a set of customer databases and capabilities that are centrally located such that anytime a customer visits us, whether it be here in Las Vegas, Nevada, whether it's in Atlantic City, Topeka, Kansas, or Phoenix, Arizona, that customer’s information by their designation and to their benefit is available such that we can treat them and recognise them in a way, whether they have been to that particular property before or whether they have visited us a hundred times in the last year. So we maintain that information in a secure private way but make it real time available so that not only are they receiving offers and incentives in the mail or over the website but literally now we have done a lot of what we call operational and interactive CRM. While you are on the property, during the experience, you are actually getting interactions with you customised to you.

DF: Are you doing anything on the data centre front in terms of consolidation virtualisation and different architectures to enable those systems to work more effectively and probably lower your integration costs?

TS: We sure do. You mentioned a couple things there in the address. First of all integration. Over the last five or six years we have actually integrated six different companies into the Harrah’s portfolio. I mentioned Caesars, the Horseshoe brand, a number of others coming in as well as opened and built new properties ourselves. As a part of that we have more than doubled arguably almost tripled the amount of infrastructure and connectivity within the company. Interestingly over the course of those years, we’ve consolidated much of the systems to be in central locations as opposed to out in those individual properties as many hotels and casinos have historically been. And as a result we are now moving in as we speak into a new data centre located in Tennessee that is built state of the art to be able to handle a significant amount of our domestic capacity but also designed to be capable of international growth. We have a second facility located in New Jersey that is a co-lo facility just outside across the river of New York city where a lot of financial institutions and the like also are housed and that really gives us the ability to not to only have disaster recovery but increasingly what I call active-active or highly available environment where we can operate the company in a load balanced and or disaster recovery mode to switch back and forth as needed.

DF: Now you are also the chief innovation officer and I’m really curious about the kinds of innovations you can bring into the casino environment or the hotel environment for that matter especially mobility and wireless technology and how you can for example just be walking around and making wagers or getting messages about some amenity that you might be able to use

TS: You’re right on. These are the things that actually excite me. In you are normal IT job often you get asked the question, “what keeps you up at night?” and that job will do it. This is also the one that keeps me up because it really is the exciting and cool part. We’ve got the ability today with much of the system instrumentation, the data, the customer information to do some pretty cool and compelling things. Now as you consider innovation and the piece that technology plays in that, particular that we in a consumer business, people have an experience whether it’s online or with their cell phone, or fantasy football leagues or chat. There’s a lot of things we are increasingly taking for granted in our personal lives and when you come to a resort destination or even a few hours getaway at one of our more localised casinos in Missouri or Indiana or Illinois, it’s a little bit of escapism so we are working on a variety of approaches to make that experience event better. I alluded to some of the operational CRM, increasingly our initiative will be on interactive CRM capabilities that say I have personal preferences, I like certain promotions, maybe it enters me in those, perhaps I can find my friends. We are doing some interesting things called ‘Second Chance to Win’ where perhaps your spouse or friend or partner that you are coming with is also gaming or on the floor somewhere when they, you win, or get notified. Perhaps you’ve done an online community where you would like to experience both online and offline some of the friends or meet those people. There are all kinds of cool things that are possible and we are now using a few of our key markets particularly Las Vegas and a few others to test and demo some of these concepts with our customers. And the response has been pretty exciting.

DF: I’d like to bring my own smart phone in and be able to get messages, see what the opportunities are, and even to make bets from that device.

TS: Well we’d love to have you come in and do that. So please make Harrah’s your first stop in that. I will say two things on that. That the cell phone capabilities are there today, you can do certainly SMS messaging in a variety of things with WAP-sites and stuff on those phones. This is a bit of a holy grail because the lack of consistency in standardisation in the way phones are implemented are executed, the coverage inside these large casinos, steel buildings are not trivial. We are increasingly making headway against that as well as in open spaces like here in Las Vegas where we have eight properties and walking between them. Now you may be surprised to know that the great state of Nevada will be the first place where the type of gaming you just referred to will be tested. We’re currently developing some trials for mobile hand-held based gaming. They are on PDA’s, tablets. Cell phones are a bit of a tough form factor to work with now but its coming. And the middle to latter part of this year there will be several tests and trials which we expect to be right in the forefront of going on. So come on out and give it a try.

DF: Alright so I’ve heard about some RFID tests where chips have RFID tags and the tables have readers and is that an innovation you are thinking of or have you already deployed?

TS: We have been currently spent a lot of time last year rolling out the base capability there so if you walk around Harrah’s or Caesars property today, Horseshoe, you will see a bunch of devices attached to the side of the table. It’s a little touch-screen and it allows the dealer or the host to interact, put your information in there, swipe your total rewards card and kind of get the process going. The next piece of technology that we will be introducing in the Las Vegas market, let me say that, will be the RFID based technology. What it does is it observes through sensors in the table and chips in the chip the different movement and bet activity associated with those and then there’s a couple of different ways that the cards themselves can actually be looked at after the fact such that we can determine what was the outcome of that. And so your tracking ability to the customers’ benefit now becomes very much like it is in the slot environment. If you use your total rewards card you are now getting full credit value for all of your play and again now we can kick-in some of that operational or interactive CRM things to recognise and reward you to the level of your experience.

DF: Now is that also an effective deterrent on the security front?

TS: It certainly has some help. Any technology capability that we deploy, you try to look at what the business case is. This one actually is much to the customer’s benefit although there is some learning and training that we think will be involved and some operational kinks to work out. But there is a component around counterfeit chips, the transference of chips in and amongst and between properties, so it does have some help on the security front. Clearly, everyone who has watches some TV and shows like Las Vegas we have other ways we can come at that challenge with digital video photography and video surveillance activities and certainly folks just observing and watching on the floor. But it does help in that regard.

DF: Well as chief innovation officer, maybe you can give us some tips on how you encourage innovation and you create a culture that is really based on being competitive and not just trying to do sustaining technology but disruptive technology?

TS: Again near and dear to my heart. I kind of think of it in three simple ways. Number one, we are looking at how do we commercialise as well or better than anybody out there. There’s just a vast array of cool and interesting technologies and non-technological processes and business approaches that we think are pretty neat and its all about how you implement and execute those in my experience. Particular in the size and scale and amount of customers we interact with each and every day and the employee side as well. So that’s really the number one thing. Two, how we go about that is certainly looking and validating and kind of considering many of these but also driving innovation from within our operation and so we are putting in place several test sites across our forty plus North American properties where there will be in markets or within a certain brand, one of the casinos will be a channel for trying new things out and also for soliciting employee input which is so important into this process. Many of the best ideas actually either come from or are tweaked or modified by folks who are dealing with customers or operations day to day. And that’s a big part of our strategy. The third part is partnerships and again there are lots of different technology and different folks coming out with things and we are very interested in those. But through developing some interesting two-way partnerships, solving tough business problems, wouldn’t it be neat to do this, how might we think about that, navigating the crazy world of intellectual property and all that and then partnering up with some key firms or companies that can help bring cool ideas to life and operationalise those. Those are some of the partnerships we have or are putting in place now and as we develop out some of these cool new environments like in Las Vegas and others, I think you will some exciting things on that front from us.