Seven questions for your operation
Casino marketers agree that social media is a powerful marketing tool to reach our players. We create content and advertisements to enhance our brand awareness and share information with our guests, but we need to do a better job of treating social media as an opportunity to provide excellent guest service.
Social media sites are not just powerful tools for sharing promotions, events, entertainment, dining specials, new games, hotel renovations and jackpot winners. They are a powerful place to provide excellent guest service, gain insights into your operations, and learn about the unfiltered opinions of your players.
The simple fact is that many casinos around the globe are ignoring a key element: social media as guest service. Across all social media platforms, people are sharing information about their experience with our businesses. They’re asking questions, sending messages, writing comments and submitting reviews on every platform every day, at all hours of the day, regardless of the information that is already on our website and mobile app. These should all be considered by our organization as an extension of our guest service program. Our players are visiting our Facebook pages, Yelp profiles, Google My Business listings, TripAdvisor accounts, Instagram pages, Twitter handles and YouTube channels and freely giving us valuable feedback, only to be ignored.
More and more, our guests are interacting with us online when they have questions, feedback or need help. We may be monitoring and responding to reviews on our primary casino page, but ignoring some of our amenities that are listed.
Your casino, hotel, restaurant, spa, entertainment venue, golf course, conference center, arcade and retail stores likely have business listings available on many of the social media and review-based platforms. Some of them have been claimed and owned by the property, others may just exist without our knowledge.
Granted, we could probably do without Martha complaining about the burnt popcorn on Bingo’s Facebook Page for the 200th time, but the knowledge that our popcorn machine needs to be serviced could provide an opportunity to improve our operation. We may also discover that Martha is a top-tier player and brand advocate, and generally just wants her complaint to be acknowledged. “Thank you, Martha! We are getting the machine recalibrated and will try to clear up the air for your nostril pleasure. We hope you enjoy the free and perfectly popped corn on your next visit.”
Excellent guest service has always been the backbone of every good casino operation. We need to stop thinking of social media as simply a marketing tool for posting billboard advertisements and poster art, and start paying more attention to what people are saying and how our organization is responding.
Here are a few questions to help evaluate your operation:
- Have we claimed all our online business listings across all platforms?
- Are we using any reputation management or social listening tools to monitor our assets?
- Who at our property is responsible for responding to comments, questions, messages and reviews?
- Do we have procedures in place to handle common complaints, serious inquiries and general feedback?
- Which platforms are most commonly used for guest feedback?
- How can we improve response time for inquiries from players?
- How do we follow up on specific items with other department managers?
Take the time to assess your social media and view it as a guest service situation, and create a strategic methodology to collect and share that feedback.
