What are these tools, and what combination is the best for your property goals?
There are so many words to describe the software systems in database marketing, and it can be confusing. I am going to cover the differences between a Player Management System, a data warehouse, a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system, and a BI (Business Intelligence) system.
The first one is easy, the Player Management System.
PMS is the product that comes with your casino management system, and is where you manage your guests on a day-to-day basis. The CMS provides analytical tools for marketing and, with add-ons at a cost, also offers campaign management and some BI capabilities.
The CMS system secures data and stores it in a database to be retrieved for future use.
This database is different from a data warehouse. A data warehouse stores a massive accumulation of data from multiple sources. For your casino, a data warehouse would contain the guest information from your CMS, but it could also bring in other data, for example, from the hotel or food & beverage. It can also contain additional marketing information, like campaigns run from an outside source or survey information.
Now CRM and BI are easy to confuse, because they share many of the same functions.
The CRM system is used to manage your relationship with your guests. It executes all parts of the guest experience, from contact management and campaigns, to sales and service. It tracks the guest journey through the process.
Business Intelligence, however, is the process of making informed decisions from real-time or near real-time data.
BI was developed to help us manage the exponential growth of data, and turn all this information into insightful reports to help us see patterns and trends in our business. BI tools use your historical data to present actionable information through analysis, reports, dashboards, and data visualizations.
How do these all work together?
The CMS/Player Management System is the base of the guest data. Many casinos stop there, and use the add-ons available and Microsoft products to complete guest campaign management and analytics. With a good SQL person and analyst, that may accomplish the goals set. Adding the additional data through a data warehouse to understand other behaviors of your guests is the next layer. Building a data warehouse that can include your guests’ gaming behavior, along with their other resort behavior, to get a full understanding of their true spend with you and what else influences their purchases is beneficial for creating more significant insights into your organization.
If you can afford both a CRM and a BI system, or a hybrid of the two, you can get the best of both worlds. CRM and BI are core components of the same ultimate goal; to inform your business decisions and execute guest relationships using comprehensive data. Hooking up your BI tool and your CRM software will provide a much richer profile of your guests. This information is essential to understanding your guests’ behavior and analyzing your reinvestment and segmentation strategy. There are great tools out there at all levels of price point. You need a skilled marketer to truly leverage either of these tools in building better guest relationships and analyze the results. They are able to discover and report trends that can help in delivering a better guest experience.
If you are thinking about purchasing any of these soon, first – know your goals and what you are looking to accomplish.
Buying any of the above can be an expensive investment. You want to understand your long-term goals and where you want to go in the future. Going through this process will ensure your purchase allows you to expand into your future goals. I would recommend working with someone to make sure that you have gathered all the right questions.
If you are looking to invest in your GUESTS and are not sure how to go about it, we can bring clarity and an understanding of guest-based processes. Many of us get caught up in tactical execution and don’t have time to look at the strategic drivers of a problem, which may come from issues with disparate guest databases in silos and seeing true guest profitability. We’d love to help if any of this rings true. To find out more about how Raving can help, please contact Amy Hergenrother, VP of Client Services, at 775-329-7864.
