American Indian Report - July 2008 - (Page 15)

Customer Tracking: What Tribal Casinos Know About Their Patrons Millions and millions of Americans and foreigners visit tribal casinos every year, and, amazingly, these properties know much about who they are — their names, where they are from, their gambling preferences and often even what they like to eat at restaurants and buy in shops, whether they like rock or jazz or to play golf or get a massage. Does not take much to get the information either, just a player’s club and technology. It is the application for the player’s club, which most tribal casinos have, that gathers all the vital information: name, address, phone and age and a government-issued I.D., like a driver’s license. But all the preferential data is collected by tracking players via a casino management system (CMS). More than 500 casinos, many of them Native American, use Bally Technology products, including its suite of CMS solutions. There are roughly 375,000 Bally Technology gaming machines in use around the world. A Bally CMS® product leaves it up to the casino to determine the data to gather, but Derik Mooberry, vice president of systems sales for the Western and North American regions, said, “It is almost unlimited in the data it can collect,” he said. Bally CMS offers configurable fields to meet a casino’s marketing A gambler that wants to play and other business intelligence any of its 2,400 Instant Multineeds. It can gather data on play- Games machines must obtain ers’ special interests, for example, a Diamond Card. It is like an like the types of casino events, ATM card, said Sue Gatley, manconcert music and amenities they ager business analyst at Turning like. Stone. At the time of application, Really, the only thing a CMS can- the casino scans the applicant’s not collect is identifying data on driver’s license or other form people playing machines or at a of I.D., capturing data such as table games that are not members name, address, date of birth and of a casino’s player club. Mooberry gender, and an image of the acsaid, though, that Bally Technolo- count holder. gies, in its effort to be on the While Diamond Card holders forefront of responsible gaming, is play, the system tracks in reallooking at giving casinos the op- time the games they are playing, tion to use facial recognition technology, built into the machines, to monitor patrons who have identified themselves as problem gamblers. You could say the Oneida Indian Nation of Bally Tech’s iVIEW. Photo courtesy of Bally Technologies New York has an edge at its Turning Stone Resort the amount played, how long and Casino, where, due to state they stay at any machine and law, it uses a propriety cashless denominations played. With the system, called Oneida OII™. The card usable in restaurants and system, not a loyalty system, shops on property, the casino although the casino has these can monitor eating and shopping too, gathers data on most of the preferences. 4.1 million visitors it welcomes “We know absolutely everything annually. a person is doing,” said Gatley. American Indian Report July 2008 15 http://ballytech.com/ http://ballytech.com/ http://oneida-nation.net/ http://oneida-nation.net/ http://www.turningstone.com/ http://www.turningstone.com/ http://www.standingstonegaming.com/page03.html

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of American Indian Report - July 2008

American Indian Report - July 2008 Contents Wolf Research; Native Language Scrabble; Indian Baseball History; Art; NEA Award Ethics & Standards of Conduct: Dual Roles - A Balancing Act Congress: Activity on the Hill Knowing Your Customer Grants: Tribal Transit Program - Putting Public Transportation in Rural Tribal Communities Indian Country Struggles with Skyrocketing Gas Prices Isolated Village Tackles Unique Environmental Issues CSKT and Wildlife Service Sign Bison Range Agreement Fostering Connections to Success Act Passed in House Tribal Government: Strategic Planning - A Shorter Assessment Process

American Indian Report - July 2008

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