The Agile Casino and the Cross-Functional Technology Keeping Them Competitive
The key to increasing casino ROI
Casino establishments are only as good as their reputation. Preventing crime, preserving order, protecting property, and maintaining legal compliance are critical to keeping casinos running to the highest standard. This however is no easy task as Casinos face many unique challenges — like cheating and theft at game tables — that other players in the hospitality and entertainment industry never have to think about. While security and video surveillance, play a vital role in addressing these concerns, investments in necessary infrastructure are difficult to justify because they are generally capped or are considered to be a fixed cost. It’s easy to track ROI on that new game table; video analytics technology to level up your security and surveillance? Seems impossible. However, security as well as operations, sales, merchandising, and marketing can measurably increase efficiencies by leveraging data-driven technologies that support informed decision-making and justify the investment. The agile casino is utilizing cross-functional technology, like video analytics, to keep them competitive, increase returns, and deliver an optimal experience to their guests.
Maximizing impact with video analytics
Comprehensive video analytics solutions are uniquely positioned to support this cross-functional need for casinos due to the fact that they all rely heavily on their video surveillance infrastructure investments. Adding video analytics to the mix immediately expands the scope of this extensive investment by increasing the effectiveness of physical security, while simultaneously providing value to other critical departments like marketing, hotel group, and guest experience. When a casino transforms video into business intelligence, they can make strategic decisions across business units, maximizing the impact of operations, physical security, and guest experiences.
Take a deeper look into how video analytics are maximizing impact for these critical casino departments:
1. Physical Security
While physical security is the first and most obvious place where video analytics has an impact, it’s still worth mentioning because video analytics has the power to transform physical security tools into holistic safety solutions. For example, historically, post-incident video review was done manually which is not only impossibly time intensive but limited by operator capacity and error. However, video analytics addresses video review holistically by empowering you to search and filter video with speed and precision based on an ever-expanding set of object class and attribute combinations like face and license plate recognition, appearance similarity, guest demographics, and more. Video analytics can also accelerate investigations into false claims by providing greater post-incident understanding to ultimately reduce litigation risk to the casino.
Video analytics is as useful at accelerating investigations as it is empowering proactive security measures. For casinos, maintaining order and integrity is of the utmost importance to the long-term success of their business. By leveraging video analytics features like watchlists, casinos can recognize people of interest, known or repeat card counting offenders, and banned visitors in real-time. Understanding unique guest traffic throughout the property, managing and complying with safe occupancy regulations, and ensuring public safety are just a few of the other pieces to the holistic security solution available with comprehensive video analytics.
2. Guest Experience
In the world of hospitality and entertainment, guest experience is king, and comprehensive video analytics is the perfect tool to keep the shine on the king’s crown. Video analytics can not only derive data reports for uncovering trends, demographic and behavioral insights, and popular areas of interest to drive intelligent decision-making and targeted engagement with guests, but it can also support intelligent staff deployment. Casinos can develop employee watchlists to evaluate and aggregate staff traffic, uncover patterns, and create plans for effective distribution throughout the venue to quickly and efficiently meet guest needs and service expectations. Furthermore, guests expect pristine facilities during their casino experience. Video analytics helps you deliver on this expectation by enabling count–based alerts that trigger notifications for cleaning crews after a certain number of people have entered a space.
Real-time alerts are also useful for tracking VIP traffic. Video analytics can trigger alerts that notify management of a VIP arrival to ensure they receive special services upon entry and in location specific areas such as VIP card tables and dining areas. Can you imagine your VIP host having the ability to greet VIP guests with their preferred beverage the second they walk through the door? Casinos are doing it with video analytics!
3. Operations
Casinos are large and busy venues, so any tool that can increase real-time situational awareness is indispensable for the operations department. Video analytics increases real-time situational awareness for queue and crowd control for lobbies, slot machines, and game tables to make sure there is a seamless experience out on the floor. When things start getting congested in the lobby or in queues, count-based alerts, proactively set by management, enable the proactive deployment of staff to redirect traffic.
Space utilization is another unique value that video analytics can offer to casino users. Video analytics can quantify traffic patterns and develop heat maps to uncover the most popular pathways, entrances, game tables, and slot machines. Larger casinos often have retail space which can also benefit from quantifiable data like people counting metrics. Operations teams can then leverage the data to develop effective layouts, product placement, and targeted advertising once they have a deeper understanding of traffic flows and trends.
It’s time to acknowledge that legacy surveillance assets and even new point solutions are no longer cutting it in the complex casino management. Casinos need cross-functional technology, like comprehensive video analytics, to keep them competitive, increase returns, and deliver optimal experiences to their guests. Video analytics is the data-driven driver behind the most agile casinos in the industry. Will you up on board or be left behind?
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