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Case Study

Isle of Capri Casinos Makes a Sure Bet

Investment in data warehouse and CRM tools pays off for this innovative gaming company.

Isle of Capri Casinos is a unique and innovative player in the gaming industry. Since its 1992 founding in Biloxi, Miss., the firm’s pioneering approach in promising new markets has enabled it to grow into one of the largest publicly traded gaming companies in the US.

With 15 properties that offer lodging, gaming and entertainment in six states, Isle bases its competitive advantage largely on guest relationships created and enhanced by an atmosphere that anticipates guests’ needs and exceeds their expectations. Two components make this possible: a company culture focused on making every guest experience enjoyable and a data platform that enables ever deeper understanding of the clientele.

Clear Vision

Continuously focused on new customer insights, Isle seeks to build loyalty through enhanced and timely marketing efforts. This goal was at the heart of Isle’s decision to build a robust data warehouse, complemented by leading customer relationship management (CRM) and business intelligence (BI) applications. As a result, management has made database management and segmentation a core competency.

“Our technology is designed to elevate the gaming experience and to better understand and strengthen our relationships with customers,” says Jeanne-Marie Wilkins, senior vice president and CIO. “We can market more efficiently through customized incentives and promotions and more effectively through a deeper knowledge of our guests, their preferences and their behavior.”

Achieving that level of CRM sophistication didn’t come easily. It required addressing some unique obstacles, including emerging from Hurricane Katrina, with the will and foresight to innovate and invest.

Start and Restart

For Isle of Capri, the marketing challenge is particularly difficult because of the geographical diversity of its properties and clientele in Mississippi, Louisiana, Missouri, Iowa, Colorado and Florida. So Isle needed to segment customers while at the same time maintaining and building an overall brand image.

Historically, the firm’s direct mail program was managed piecemeal through the casino management system housed at each property. “The goal was to get our CRM processes to function through a data warehouse so that the ‘single view of business’ would boost direct mail—and e-mail—campaigns,” says Ryan Murphy, Isle’s senior director of BI.

To that end, in 2004, the company started to implement a data warehouse project that initially didn’t involve Teradata. Then Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast in 2005. At the time, Isle’s headquarters were in Biloxi, so the focus shifted to recovery efforts.

As the company began plans to relocate corporate headquarters to St. Louis, leadership decided to reboot the project. And in 2006, Teradata was selected for the data warehouse and CRM tool, and IBM Cognos for the BI platform. The new system went live in 2007.

Market Magic

With the solution in place, the casino could quickly and easily identify a key market, segment that market, pull a direct mail file and build several new criteria into it. The new and changing insights made possible by an expanding data store—as well as by the ability to quickly gather information and build campaigns—facilitated precisely targeted offers to successfully motivate people to visit Isle of Capri casinos and to engage more profitably once there.

For example, marketers segment customers based on the frequency of their visits, which, in turn, has become a factor in determining the number and value of offers. “A player who comes four times a month needs a much less aggressive incentive than one who only comes once a month,” notes Mike Kelly, marketing manager.

Isle’s corporate marketing team can pull information and configure campaigns in half the time it used to require. Moreover, both the team and individual properties can better track the results of campaigns and even know immediately when a customer redeems a coupon.

Extended Benefits

While the focus was initially on improving direct mail marketing, the scope soon expanded when the company’s new president and COO, Virginia McDowell, assembled a management team that included Wilkins. Because of her experience with Teradata and IBM Cognos software in the gaming industry, Wilkins says, “I knew how rich the possibilities with this combination were.”

As a result, Isle has moved from a system where a handful of marketing analysts ran reports to a robust platform that allowed multiple business users to explore and make sense of the company’s wealth of data. Examples abound:

• Some executives receive e-mails triggered not by a schedule but by the occurrence of a particular event, such as when a transaction hits a certain level or a property has an outlier day.
• By combining data on customer value and total property value, Isle gains a better understanding of retail customers—a population that was invisible before. This enables more effective targeted advertising efforts, such as radio ads.
• Daily revenue numbers are posted on the company’s intranet so properties can compare performance on everything from slot machines to hotel reservations. And because locations can compare their results in multiple areas, each is accountable for constantly raising the bar.

“Phase 2 is the bigger story because it’s where we can truly use our Teradata solution to scale up and add value,” Wilkins says. “We are no longer satisfied with getting better at segmentation and more efficient at producing mail.”

Uncommon Hospitality

Building on the initial results, the company sought to incorporate hotel and slot machine data. By engaging users on the hospitality side, the BI team uncovered several key processes.

First, Isle tagged guests by the number of days they stay in a hotel. Then, it generated insights by experimenting with a series of segmentations: Who stayed at least two or three times? Who gamed and who didn’t? How much did staying in a hotel affect a customer’s gaming activity?

The results included a vitally important but counterintuitive insight that would have gone unnoticed without the new analytics capabilities: Customers who live close to a casino and don’t need to stay overnight will play more when they stay in a property’s hotel. Furthermore, they play more than hotel guests who live farther away. Isle has effectively transformed this information into marketing campaigns that successfully encourage local patrons to stay overnight, including offers of a free night in a hotel or a second free night at a later date to encourage another visit.

“The addition of hotel data to the warehouse enabled us to understand just how vital the hotel business is to our entire operation,” says Jim Luden, senior director of direct marketing. “We know now that not having visibility into the hotel side severely hindered our overall revenue and, in turn, that direct mail can drive hotel occupancy.”

In essence, Isle of Capri taps into hotel data to get more profitable customers into the properties more of the time—and to serve them better during their stays. “The data and the speed of delivery allows the marketing team to be more scientific about who gets what,” notes Kelly. “We receive ratings twice a day or more from very current data that allows us to look at the business at a much faster pace. That’s important because people don’t always stick to the same behaviors, and we need to be constantly looking at trends and adapting appropriately.”

Progressive Payoffs

Moving forward, Isle is adding slot machine data to the mix. The short-term impact will be an enhanced ability to determine where high-value players prefer machines to be located and to direct customers to new games based on past behavior. Eventually, the organization plans to closely track player activity on slots so it can deepen customer understanding, further hone promotions and adapt the floor in each casino to optimize revenue and profit.

Although the original plans for Isle of Capri’s data warehouse, CRM and BI project focused on the important but limited function of improving direct mail marketing efforts, the introduction of a new management team has enabled the firm to broaden its efforts. By extending the scope to new areas, such as hotel and slot machine data, the payoffs have been remarkable.