Harrah's Hotel Casino: "Service at the Speed of Slots"
Harrah's, one of the premier names in the gaming industry, has learned it's best not to gamble with customer satisfaction. The company's reputation for customer service has contributed strongly to its growth, but is also resulted in a challenging dilemma: How to maintain service at a personal level when dealing with tens of thousands of customers per year. The use of more than a little technology, however, with the AS/400 at its core, means customer service has never been better.
Harrah's Atlantic City is one of 16 casino properties operated worldwide by Harrah's Entertainment Inc., Memphis, TN. It attracts a clientele from throughout the East Coast. Ann Metzger, director of information technology, says the site uses two AS/400s, an older B70 and an Advanced System Model 320. The two machines have a combined 90 gigabytes of internal and IBM 9336 disk storage. They support the casino and its marketing operations, primarily with custom software.
Periodically, and unpredictably, any number of casino's 2,000 slot machines require assistance. A door is left open. A machine is out of money. A component malfunctions. A player hits a jackpot. Each of these events requires the attention of one of 30 or so service attendants assigned to various sections of the casino floor during each shift. Not long ago, attendants patrolled their assigned areas watching for the flashing lights or audible alarms that signaled a machine in need of attention. During peak times, however, all attendants in a section could be busy while other attendants were waiting for alarms.
The Solution
Harrah's decided to use the AS/400 to provide a more systematic and efficient alternative to trolling attendants. The casino installed MessengerPlus Version 4.0 from Bytware, Inc., Reno, NV. This monitoring and paging system for the AS/400, installed September 1995, watches over Harrah's casino floor for jackpots, machine malfunctions and high rollers.
How does it work? When a slot machine sends out a message that it needs attentions, MessengerPlus immediately pages its way through a defined list of attendants and then starts again at the top of the list until the message is answered. A Schedule Paging function also lets the program determine automatically which pager to contact based on the time of day.
Neither MessengerPlus nor the AS/400s are connected to the slot machines directly. Rather, they read messages generated by the machines that are passed through an IBM RS/6000. "We wrote APPC (Advanced Program-to-Program Communications) programs on the AS/400 to send and receive messages," says Metzger. "The AS/400 program then calls a MessengerPlus API to send the message to a pager."
"Anything that can connect to an AS/400 can be made to generate a message," explains Mike Grant, founder of Bytware. "MessengerPlus can page based on any message. No other connection is required." On the AS/400, the product can monitor and act on systems messages, the Work with Active Jobs (WRKACTJOB) display, Work with Job Queues (WRKJOBQ) display, the Work with Output Queues (WORKOUTQ) display, and the arrival of new electronic mail.
Grant says customers use the product to monitor ATM machines, pay-per-view systems, magnetic card readers and various environmental monitors such as air conditioners or alarm systems. US paging systems have standardized on a common protocol called TAP, he says, and Bytware has not encountered a paging system that does not use it.
Internal Paging System
Rather than go through a commercial service, Harrah's has its own in-house paging system. But even internal campus paging systems such at Harrah's are based on the TAP protocol, says Grant, so the coding wasn't a problem.
International paging systems are a different story, though. Pagers are not as common in other countries as they are in the US, and each country may have different protocols for which Bytware must develop code to add to the standard product. "Therefore, we develop protocols that make sense, those that will serve the greatest number of customers in a particular country," says Grant.
MessengerPlus currently supports paging in the Netherlands, Germany, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Italy and the United Kingdom, he says. Once the connection to the paging system was complete, Harrah's technicians had created a database of casino floor jobs within MessengerPlus. This database lists who to page in what sequence, and designates how long to wait between pages. The application has been running 24 hours a day, seven days a week since September 1995, and "nothing seems to go wrong with it," says Metzger.
"We looked at two other programs, but MessengerPlus was chosen because the program is easy to understand, the documentation is very good—making it easy to set up—and customer support is excellent," Metzger says. "Bytware's product allowed us to connect to our paging systems directly, without using a dial-up connection, which would have slowed the pages down."
Other uses for paging
In addition to slot machine management, Harrah's has other uses for its paging system. MessengerPlus also monitors the casino's 80 gaming tables for VIP players so staff can give them the attention that keeps them coming back.
At the customer's request, Harrah's evaluates and rates players, issues an account number and stores that customer information in a database. Rated customers may receive "complementaries"—free meals or rooms or other perks—at the discretion of Harrah's staff. When a rated customer begins playing a table game, the pit clerk enters the player's account number into a terminal located at the table. MessengerPlus recognizes guests who have ratings above a predetermined level, then pages a member of the marketing staff so he or she can personally greet the customer and, if appropriate, offer complimentary services.
In this case, the function of the product goes beyond maintenance to provide Harrah's with the ability to offer a distinctive level of service. "MessengerPlus gives us a strategic advantage in the gaming market in Atlantic City," says Metzger. "It enables us to get out there and talk to our customers one-on-one. If we didn't have [it] our service level would drop, especially during the busy summer season."
Harrah's is currently running Version 4.0 of the product, but plans to upgrade to the recently released 5.0 version early this year. Metzger says Harrah's will continue to use only the informational paging portion of MessengerPlus, but the new product has numerous other functions. These include the introduction of Event Monitors and Event Queues, a job performance monitor, a job queue monitor, expanded action options and improved message filtering and security. Both versions of the product support unlimited users and as many communications lines as the AS/400 permits.
Last fall, Bytware also announced support of 2-way paging, making the AS/400 one of the first computer systems to be able to take advantage of this innovative service from select commercial paging services, says Grant. Sounding a little like the communicators worn by the crew of the Starship Enterprise, 2-way pagers allow users to reply directly to messages received by typing an alphanumeric message. MessengerPlus would allow users to respond immediately to AS/400 messages by selecting among possible options displayed with the message.
For example, says Grant, if the backup of an AS/400 running unattended is stopped because of an uninitialized tape, an operator would not have to go into the data center or find a terminal from which to dial in. He or she would be able to initialize the tape and resume backups by sending a message back through the 2-way pager.
While Harrah's attendants may never be telling a slot machine to close its own door or restock itself with money, an AS/400-based paging system is providing a way for the casino to take personalized customer service to new levels, and that 's a gamble that is paying off.
Resource Details
Type: Case Study
Product: MessengerPlus
Customer: Harrah's Hotel Casino
Summary
One of the premier names in the gaming industry takes service to its highest level by using MessengerPlus to keep watch over the casino floor for jackpots, machine malfunctions, and high rollers.
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