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For Immediate Release:
June
9, 2010
Do
casinos really know how their guests feel about them? Casinos
need to have a firm understanding of the answer to this question
and it has nothing to do with satisfaction. Customer advocacy is
the key. Martin R. Baird, chief executive officer of Robinson &
Associates, Inc., explains in this article.
Do You Know If Your Casino Is
Fanatically Loved By Its Customers?
By Martin R. Baird
Do your
guests fanatically love your casino? Does your casino offer such
a superior gaming experience that it generates that kind of
devotion at the customer level?
The fanatical love question comes from none other than Forbes
magazine. In a recent opinion piece, publisher Rich Karlgarrd
didn’t write about the gaming industry, but his point was well
taken. He laid out seven skill sets of successful corporations
and one of them had to do with customer devotion. Karlgarrd
wrote that “products must stick out to get noticed and be loved
fanatically by users to get real momentum.” Successful companies
achieve that goal. (I added the italics, by the way.)
From my point of view, an equally important question is whether
casinos have even the foggiest notion of how guests feel about
them. I think few casinos really know if their guests love them
and are fanatical about them. Karlgarrd calls these customers
fanatics, and we call them advocates. Advocates are the deciding
factor in your casino’s future success.
So what do you do if you don’t know how your guests feel about
you? Fortunately, that’s simple. You measure how many advocates
you have. If you measure the degree to which your customer base
is composed of advocates and express it as an index, you have a
powerful number. From that moment forward, the index is a
benchmark for future success. The more advocates you have, the
higher the index number and the greater your success. Advocates
are critical to your bottom line because they return to your
casino again and again to play (repeat business). They tell
others about your casino and encourage them to give your
property a whirl. That creates new customers (new business). If
those new customers become advocates, the cycle starts again.
You can even use the index to predict future growth. If, for
example, you knew that a five-point jump in the index would
result in a 3 percent increase in revenue within 12 months, well
that is a potent management tool. What if you looked at it in
reverse? What if you set a goal of a 10 percent increase in
revenue and determined that you could accomplish this mission by
increasing your advocacy score by 20 points?
The beauty of such an index is that it is easy to implement and
communicate internally. Management and employees simply focus on
improving the gaming experience to raise the index ever higher.
Yes, you need to measure periodically, but managers and
employees only need to know one number. Everyone can watch the
trend line established by the index over time to know how well
they are doing. That is about as simple as you can get.
I didn’t dream this up. Research published in Harvard Business
Review shows there is absolutely no correlation between customer
satisfaction and the future performance of any business. Even
measuring customer loyalty is not good enough. The Harvard
article points directly to advocacy as the key. The importance
of advocacy is the result of 10 years of research of more than
4,000 customers in 14 industries. Advocacy is not well known in
gaming but it is in other industries. Companies such as Dell,
Intuit, Enterprise Rent-A-car, Symantec and Harley Davidson use
methodology similar to the index I’ve mentioned in this article.
The research published by Harvard undermines the gaming
industry’s infatuation with customer satisfaction surveys and
comment cards. Neither can identify the customer as an advocate.
Measuring satisfaction is a waste of time, energy and money. The
problem is that guests can say anything they want on a survey or
card because they have nothing at stake. But they put their
personal reputation on the line if they advocate on behalf of
your casino by voluntarily recommending it to others.
Guests who fanatically love your casino are advocates. You want
to have as many of those customers as you can possibly get. Your
casino may very well have some advocates in its customer base,
but to what extent? You need to know the answer to that question
so you understand where you stand today. Only then can you plan
your future success.
To read other articles by Martin Baird, go to
www.casinocustomerservice.com/post.htm
Martin R. Baird is chief executive officer of Robinson &
Associates, Inc., a Boise, Idaho-based consulting firm to the
global gaming industry that is dedicated to helping casinos
improve their guest service so they can compete and generate
future growth and profitability. Robinson & Associates is the
world leader in casino guest experience measurement and
improvement. For more information, visit the company’s Web sites
at www.advocateindex.com or contact the company at 206-774-8856.
Robinson & Associates is an associate member of the National
Indian Gaming Association.
CONTACT: Tom Ellis
Ellis Communications, Inc.
Phone (417) 881-5635
E-Mail tellis@casinocustomerservice.com
Yahoo IM tom_ellis46 |
