CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero spoke to Kresimir Spajic, senior vice president for online gaming at Hard Rock International, about catering the consumers at a time when opportunities in the industry are opening up.
The key to serving and maintaining customers, as Hard Rock International’s Kresimir Spajic sees it, is to make it all easy.
“We are trying to deliver to our customers as many touchpoints as possible with a seamless experience, and how we define seamless is basically giving possibility to use a single sign-up, to have a single loyalty card, and to have a single wallet,” the senior vice president for online gaming at Hard Rock International told CalvinAyre.com.
When customers are in physical casinos, they’re given access to information on online products, which also serve to get them coming back to the physical casinos.
“The biggest point when they’re inside of our property is to try to kind of give them the opportunity to download our apps and our online products, inform them about this, and then through those products basically stay in touch, create some kind of loyalty incentive for them so they have that app on their screens and use it quite often in order to earn something and have a reason basically to return to our properties,” he said.
It’s important for Spajic to get in the head of online and physical visitors, allowing them to go from freebies to paid products. “When it comes to personalization, it’s about segmenting basically customers as we see what their needs and interests are. We are trying to create a single view of each customer through all our verticals so we try to understand what they do when they visit our retail properties as well as when they visit a variety of our digital channels. And one thing is very important for us. We are trying basically to offer them a different digital experience, from free-to-play games, which you do not have anything to do with gaming, to free-to-play gaming and real money gaming online,” according to the Hard Rock International executive.
And with sports betting in the US poised to take off in the coming months and years, Spajic notes the challenges in determining what each state needs, since not every state is going to embrace both online and retail properties equally at first. “This is an exciting time. This is why I’ve been hired. This is what we’ve been expecting for the last few years, and it seems that what is taking traction is first, sports betting. It will be kind of divided in the beginning to retail business, and then some states also do mobile or online. We believe as the market matures, there will be more and more states regulating both retail and online vertical, not only in the sports betting area but also gaming area in general, and it’s an exciting time for us because we operate already in seven U.S. states and plan to add a couple more,” he said.
