KONAMI
Konami develops innovative mobile solutions for players and employees
Konami has launched Konetic Mobile, a suite of exciting new solutions for both employees and patrons that enhance the player experience and drive new business to your casino… COO Steve Sutherland and R&D VP Tom Soukup talked to Casino International
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here’s a lot of buzz in our industry about player retention and using mobile devices to increase player traffic and spend, while also improving the player experience when they visit the bricks-and-mortar casino.
Konami’s applications – for both player and employee – tie in with their casino management system to bring benefits to everyone on the floor. The Konami Casino Management System Player
Interface is a mobile gateway, which allows casinos with KCMS to deploy their own branded Android, iPhone, Blackberry, and Mobile web apps. It also gives the casinos an opportunity to engage with their guests more strategically and more often, while offering players current offers and up-to-date information on their loyalty club status – anywhere, anytime. This kind of communication, directly into the player’s hand regardless of where they are, is incredibly valuable, and can be used with back-end player analysis to conduct marketing faster and more economically. Konami invested time and resources to develop the powerful interfaces with its KCMS database. It also built a mobile app which casinos can deploy for their employees in order to provide functionality that had previously required an immobile workstation right to the employees’ mobile devices. On the player side, in order to provide the most customization and fastest speed to market for KCMS customers, Konami partnered with mobile and social technology company Joingo to build and customize each casino’s player app. Steve and Tom explain…
CI: What value does Joingo bring to your KCMS
suite? Tom Soukup: What we have done is partner with Joingo because they specialize in providing patron applications on all smartphone platforms like Android, iPhone and Blackberry. With the proliferation of smartphones, you’re getting more and more
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information on your phone. Joingo has developed applications for those individual platforms, while we focused on providing the information necessary to make these platforms deliver the ultimate value. We created a portal or interface so information from KCMS could be queried in real-time by the patron. For example, let’s say they’re running a floor wide progressive from Konami. We have a product called LotABucks, that’s a floor wide bonusing app, and with our Konetic Mobile solutions, players can check the progressive levels from anywhere in the world. They can also see their player account and see how many comps they have, what their points are and make their decisions to come into the brick-and-mortar casino. It’s a way of extending the reach of the casino loyalty program, so the customer does not have to come into the casino to see their points, they can see their offers and decide if they want to come in.
Steve: In effect it’s a great way for the casino to engage their patrons remotely. It can either be self- directed, where the patron can go and look at certain things, but also the casino can directly communicate to the patron through that portal and put offers out there to try and re-engage them if they are dormant.
CI: There’s the opportunity for actual dialogue with the player with this kind of development… and the information the casino can gather about usage could also be very valuable. TS: Exactly. It’s having that one-on-one touch point with that patron no matter where they are. At the same time, we did do an in-house development of a complete Konetic MobileTM Employee App on mobile devices, which was developed to enhance employee efficiencies and personalized customer service. The application is equivalent to having a KCMS workstation everywhere on the casino floor. For example, an employee can walk up to a patron and say, “Do you want me to cash that ticket for you?”
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