Interactive FUTURE OF CASINO DEALING
ers to be gregarious. If you watch the play on our online live gaming site, you recognise this very quickly and I’d speculate that a large number are simply there to chat to the dealer, just as you might in any form of online chat forum. If you look at retail, the player motivations are the same. Some want the dealer to chat, others want simply to play and the dealer has to interpret and interact at every level.
In terms of automation, what I’d really like to see, and which would be the ideal scenario, would be single wallet and single-rewards connected across retail, online and mobile. I think that would be an optimal environment for customers, both for retail, mobile and online. The utopia would be to create a seamless retail and online experience for players that would appeal to the largest audience possible.
Our plans are to see the dealer competition expanding to
include an element of the best
dealing recognised in our online site as well as across our clubs. We want to celebrate great
dealing wherever it touches our customers, both land-based and online.
structure within our clubs. Today, there are four senior roles in each club, starting with the general manager and including three service managers - a gaming manager (card room, electronics and table, cash desk), a people services manager (HR, train- ing and recruitment) and a customer service man- ager (outreach though the sales team, hosting events within club and all F&B). The changes have meant that there’s no longer a linear careers path within a club; the route to GM can take different paths, not just for dealers looking to progress to the gaming services manager’s role, but via a route focused on entertainment and hospitality, or a people focused route in HR. In the large units that we have in the Group, we also employ sales man- agers. The career path, therefore, has changed due to the structural change within the business.
Should retail operators ultimately aim to remove the transactional aspects of the deal and allow dealers to concentrate solely on the customers, as they do online?
If you look at dealing from purely an operational perspective, if we could make everything auto- mated, we would, but you have to take into
account the needs of both the dealer and the player, and we have to be careful that we don’t drive a strategy of automation that isn’t what either wants. We have looked closely at the tech- nology available to help the dealer in the retail environment. There have been lots of solutions that remove the chip counting functions from the retail game, for example, but there’s still resist- ance to this because our dealers are actually very good at the technical side, and I don’t think it ulti- mately impacts upon or diminishes the service we are giving. Plus, I’m not sure, at a base level, if a dealer is offering the ‘full experience’ until they’re equipped with the technical skills needed to deal in a retail location. I know that I’ve emphasised this already, but if you can’t make eye contact and you never look at a customer, then it’s also really hard for your personality to shine with this limit- ed level of interaction.
Managing a table six of eight players is a balance between behavioural, mathematical and manual skills. Players who enjoy live gaming appreciate each part of this experience - otherwise they’d be playing an electronic-only product. Customers play for different reasons, some for the game, oth-
Do online live table players also play in retail loca- tions? Are they the same player or do they just share the same traits but play in different envi- ronments?
It would be an ideal scenario to think that the online and land-based players are the same - that they would play online and then head straight into retail. I’d say that we are starting to see this shared player between retail and online, but whichever route a player comes to Grosvenor Casinos, whether mobile, desktop or retail, we have to make the journey as simple as possible. In retail, the traditional poker room used to attract players in their mid-50s - now, however, thanks to online we have a diverse split, ranging from mid-20s to mid-50s. Most of those younger play- ers started playing online and wanted to enjoy the retail experience; they signed up for the retail poker tournament by entering online. It’s a pat- tern we see with other games too.
I think that there’s an opportunity to bring both the online and retail live environments together. Of course, you have to comply with the law as regards tax, legislation and licensing, but while at present we use a studio in Riga, the ‘Point of Consumption’ tax in the UK has brought about
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