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Harrah’s Tops in CRM

25/01/2001

Harrah's is the most innovative company in building customer relations

InformationWeek and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young have ranked Harrah?s Entertainment Inc. No. 1 among the top 100 U.S. companies that use information technology to build customer relationships.
The ranking, published in the December 11 issue of InformationWeek, was made in "Innovation 100: The Customer," the first in a series of research studies being conducted by InformationWeek, a leading IT media brand, and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young, an international management and IT consulting firm.
The study focuses on companies that have implemented innovative customer-centric business and technology strategies, including industry leaders like Compaq Computer Corp., Office Depot Inc., 3Com Corp., FedEx Corp., Charles Schwab & Co., Texaco Inc. and Intel Corp. In order to compile the list, InformationWeek and Cap Gemini Ernst & Young studied how companies use technology to anticipate customer needs, rather than simply reacting to them.
"Given the high caliber of competition, achieving the No. 1 ranking is especially gratifying to us because the judges clearly recognized the power of our marketing-driven customer-loyalty program and its underlying IT infrastructure," said Gary Loveman, Chief Operating Officer of Harrah's Entertainment. Harrah?s was particularly pleased with the ranking as it was the only company in the gaming industry to make the top 100 list, which includes "the most innovative companies in building profitable and successful customer relationships" across the globe, according to InformationWeek.
John Boushy, Senior Vice President of Brand Operations and IT for Harrah's Entertainment remarked that the company realized the need to implement an information-driven approach to encourage and reward customers to remain loyal to their brand. He commented: "Like many service companies, we faced the challenge of integrating the activities of IT, marketing and operations into a cohesive set of capabilities.?

By successfully aligning these capabilities, we provide our customers with a consistently good experience at all of our properties, attract new customers who value such experiences and retain current customers more effectively. These IT, marketing and operational capabilities provided the foundation for the 12 percent same-store sales growth Harrah's has recorded this year."
The company integrated its data warehouse with Total Rewards, their nationwide customer-loyalty program, to consolidate information on more than 19 million customers. "The system enables Harrah's to analyze, predict and maximize the value of each customer relationship so we can market to them more effectively and efficiently," said Rich Mirman, Harrah's Senior Vice President of Marketing. "By measuring their responses to various marketing interventions and customer service, we know which programs will have the greatest impact on and value for individual customers. Our predictive ability grows stronger with each customer interaction."
According to Information Week, the key is giving customers what they want. The winning companies have also invested heavily in IT architecture to better understand client needs and meet 24 by 7 service expectations.
The Innovation 100 award is the latest in a series of honors Harrah's has won this year. In the past year, Harrah?s has won a number of honors including being ranked among the top five in the newspaper Computerworld?s "Best Places to Work in Information Technology" in the U.S. for the second consecutive year last June. John Boushy was also named by the newspaper as one of the Premier 100 IT leaders for 2000 in May.