Wind Creek Hospitality
Challenge
Wind Creek Hospitality is a regional hospitality and gaming enterprise operating casinos and luxury resort hotels in the State of Alabama and in the Florida Panhandle. Although Wind Creek is the dominant player in its region and had been primarily focused on its bricks and mortar businesses, the company’s CEO, Jay Dorris, believed that there were significant opportunities within the digital & social environment to increase customer loyalty, expand the company’s reach and evolve their existing business model. JazLabs collaborated with Jay and his executive management team to explore opportunities for Wind Creek to expand its offering / business model and imagine what the future of Wind Creek Hospitality might be in the burgeoning digital landscape.
Solution
JazLabs engaged in an initial consulting project with the management team to tease out relevant opportunities for innovation. After examining a broad range of industries and exploring the Wind Creek Hospitality business, its competitive environment and customer base, a new “social media” based loyalty program called My Club was created. My Club’s goal was to disrupt the traditional loyalty programs in the industry and build something that was unique for Wind Creek Hospitality. Traditional loyalty programs in the industry are typically very company-centric, transactional and lack mechanisms to build deep relationships between members and the brand. These programs periodically mail out generic, direct mail or email offers to members. Many gaming companies started using Facebook and Twitter to connect with customers and push out offers but these programs are often simple extensions of the traditional, direct mail-based programs. In these traditional programs, many customers receive offers that are not relevant to their needs and they are easily drawn away to competitors. My Club was designed to be dynamic, real-time, customer-centric and social. It puts the member in complete control of their hospitality / gaming experience, allowing them to become active partners with Wind Creek vs. being passive customers. It extend the casino-host model to as broad a group of customers as possible and offers opportunities for members to safely and securely connect and collaborate with other My Club members and with a team of community managers within Wind Creek Hospitality. My Club members do not have to wait for their monthly, generic mail offers to arrive. They can negotiate their own rewards with the community managers, create group deals that other members can join, find relevant, targeted content and play online games for fun. The community manager function was introduced into the organization to enable human connection and community growth – it is an extension of the traditional casino host model, reinvented for the digital, always-on, social world. JazLabs helped craft this organizational structure, team responsibilities and changes to the existing “standard operating procedures” to allow for a more dynamic, realtime and engaging experience for members. Casinos have evolved into very powerful, data collection entities and JazLabs had the opportunity to integrate My Club into the existing player data management systems and operational systems that already existed within the company. The realtime, personal nature of My Club allowed us to evolve the traditional direct-mail based operation to one where points accrual and points redemptions can be tailored to an individual member’s realtime spending patterns, behaviors and visits to the both the bricks-and-mortar casinos and hotel properties as well as the online My Club experience. For this multi-year engagement we delivered the following services: Digital business transformation Alpha and Beta prototyping Engagement platform development (software development, app development, enterprise integration services) Development of online loyalty program & integration into bricks-and-mortar operations Organizational structure consulting Data & Analytics Dashboard development
Results
Wind Creek has seen rapid adoption of My Club and member engagement is significantly higher on My Club than a traditional loyalty program. Wind Creek is able to build deeper, richer relationships with their members that are more personal, meaningful and relevant for both customers and staff. My Club allows members to co-create their Wind Creek experiences and provides a rich source of insights for Wind Creek management. As a result of our efforts and the success of My Club, Wind Creek Hospitality has uncovered an entirely new way of doing business. The experience of innovating, creating and accelerating customer loyalty and engagement via the My Club initiative has provided the strategic core of how the company will continue to dominate in its geographic region and the extended digital world beyond the reach of its bricks and mortar business.
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