Leading Resort and Entertainment Company Uses Data Management Technology to Enable Corporate Data Governance
By Scott Batchelor, Director of Marketing Communications, DataFlux
A leader in the gaming and destination resort industry operates casino gaming and resort and entertainment facilities across the United States and South America. As the company grew through expansion and acquisition, there was a need for an enterprisewide data governance and customer data integration program. The sheer number of data sources that contained customer information—and the amount of data collected by these applications—was growing each year, making control a vital but unattainable goal for the organization.
Like any company in the travel and hospitality arena, this one faced several data quality issues, all of which combined to prevent the company from having a consistent, accurate view of its customers. Previously, each of its properties maintained customer data in separate systems, often within multiple data repositories. Customers had unique—and often duplicate—records in the resort’s gaming system, hotel reservation repository, and point-of-sale systems.
The company also faced a series of unique regulatory challenges. Because gambling is regulated at both the state and federal levels, and because the company operates in a number of different states and countries, it must follow multiple sets of regulations. The cost of noncompliance in the industry is also particularly high; infractions can result in heavy fines or even property closure.
Ultimately, the company sought to integrate and household its customer data and create an integrated, 360-degree view of customers to provide more insight into its customer base. With a single, accurate view of customers, the company could understand what was drawing people to its resorts, what to do more effectively to meet customer demands, and how to increase customer loyalty.
A more unified view of customers provides better service while customers are onsite, and more guidance on marketing outreach programs.
To address these issues, the company sought to integrate its customer data into data warehouses. The company brought in a top data analytics and data integration consulting firm to assist. When the consulting firm saw the scope and the nature of the problem, it recommended DataFlux.
The company selected DataFlux technology to cleanse, deduplicate, and integrate its customer data. The intuitive DataFlux user interface allowed both business and IT users to easily analyze, improve, and control customer data.
With DataFlux technology, the company established deduplication and householding efforts and began migrating data into the new warehouses. The technology also made it easy for the company to establish data quality as part of its overall business practices and create a data governance program to manage cleansing and deduplicating.
With DataFlux in place, the company has made significant strides in its customer data integration efforts. Going through its holdings system by system, the organization has started to build an integrated, 360-degree view of its customers. A more unified view of customers provides better service while customers are onsite, and more guidance on marketing outreach programs. The company is able to more accurately reflect the relative value of customers, providing the foundation for a more accurate and useful loyalty program.
DataFlux has also helped the company cleanse data of duplicates before it enters its systems. The company used DataFlux technology to examine one customer list that the company was required by regulatory mandate to integrate with its systems. DataFlux helped prevent tens of thousands of duplicate records being introduced into its systems from this single list.
This article originally appeared in the issue of .