Customers

IN THIS SECTION:

♠	Review of the Group’s customer strategy and direction

AT A GLANCE

Over the past five years, we have progressively aligned all our properties around customer centricity while building operational capability. This will enable us to differentiate ourselves through the delivery of memorable, quality service-experiences designed to thrill our guests and exceed their expectations.

We address challenges as we seek to align all touch points, generate the right insights and build and enhance the appropriate marketing, promotional and sales capabilities. Our goal for 2012 is to achieve an "engaged" customer management maturity level according to our Customer Management Maturity model. This will establish customer centric leadership in our industry, focused on experience differentiation.

OUR ACHIEVEMENTS

OUR OBJECTIVES

♠	We successfully deployed our Group-wide service improvement initiative at all our properties, through on-the-job coaching sessions delivered by each functional area’s operational managers. We employed a custom-built multi-media toolkit to facilitate and engage front line staff in a fun, interactive way.
♠	We successfully established a staff recognition programme to acknowledge and celebrate front line ‘performers’ who deliver thrilling service experiences to our internal and external customers.
♠	We established usage and user acceptance of our RM solution, our large-scale centralised CRM technology solution (using Microsoft CRM and various other technology components), for both SVC and Campaign Management.
♠	We delivered a successful data quality campaign and updated in excess of 40 000 MVG records.

Our customer-focused objectives for 2012 are the following:

♠	Delivering consistent service experiences across all our Touch Points and properties in order to ensure that we deliver “A Million Thrills. One Destination.” to every guest who visits us.
♠	Developing the right marketing, promotional and sales capabilities, including the necessary skills, tools, and processes in order to target our customers more effectively with relevant offerings that are based on their needs, and are communicated via the channel of their choice.
♠	Building necessary customer information and insights, based on quality data, across our Group, so that we can deliver relevant marketing, sales and service offerings.
♠	Achieving user acceptance and entrenchment of the various CM projects/initiatives with the Group so that sustainability is ensured when the projects move to “business-as-usual”.
♠	Delivering relevant value to our business, Group and stakeholders through the various CM initiatives that we have implemented in the past four years.

Review of the Group’s customer strategy and direction

Over the past five years, we have focused our efforts on specific customer centric initiatives to improve our ability to manage our customers’ perceptions, interactions, experiences, and relationships. Our goal is to become increasingly relevant to them and meet their needs more effectively.

We have matured from an organisation which is interested in developing our customer management capability, to one which is invested in a journey to strategically align all our properties around customer centricity and build operational capability. This will enable us to differentiate ourselves through the delivery of memorable, quality service-experiences designed to thrill our guests and exceed their expectations.

We measure our progress on our Customer Management Maturity Model, a framework created from various best practice principles and models. Our goal for 2012 is to achieve an “engaged” customer management maturity level. This will establish customer centric leadership in our industry, focused on experience differentiation (Level 4 of the maturity model) (on a scale of 5).

Feedback on progress of the enabling initiatives/ projects of the CM strategy and programme

We make good progress on our Customer Management journey through the implementation of our Group customer centric focus areas, including sustaining the repositioning of the Sun International brand, continuing to engage the hearts and minds of our people, focusing on our service delivery, improving our customer communication channels, enhancing our CRM technology solution and improving our ability to capture and identify customer insights.

We have started to build our store of customer insights and we will evolve our customer strategy as we focus on creating new and improved customer experience and satisfaction measures, improving our guest feedback capability, and extracting insights from existing data. These insight-generating mechanisms also help us to improve our value propositions as well as our operations and service delivery.

CM initiatives/projects implemented during this financial year

In the year under review, the following progress was made on specified CM initiatives:

Internal communications

We improved our internal staff magazine, One Sun, which we supported with various tactical communication initiatives to ensure that important Group communication messages were delivered to all our people.

Touch Point project

This project’s aim was to ensure that our guests’ experience was consistent, memorable and a quality ‘thrilling’ service experience at each Touch Point, across our Group. 1 850 managers across all operational areas were trained to utilise the multi-media coaching toolkits. Operational managers engaged in coaching sessions with their front-line to transfer their skills and to remind staff of the operational standards. At the same time they were positioned as subject-matter experts.

Thriller Recognition programme

Over the past four years, we have recognised people who have “gone the extra mile” for our guests and other internal customers. This process has gained significant credibility and momentum. We reviewed the nomination process and now successfully celebrate service achievements by publishing the most memorable stories in the One Sun magazine.

Relationship marketing

Ensuring user acceptance of our RM solution, for SVC and Campaign Management, has started seeing a return on investment. We developed a targeted campaign of “120 Days of focus on Data Quality” aimed at: getting our people to use the system; understanding the benefit and value of having good guest information; capturing and collecting specific guest information directly in SVC; and measuring guest data quality improvements at every property. The campaign proved extremely successful.

As part of the data quality campaign, a Campaign Management “Game” was included aimed at using the customer data captured to improve marketing campaigns. The “Game” encouraged cross-functional teams at our Gaming properties to target their marketing efforts and use the technology to facilitate their campaign process.

Customer insight

In the past year we have piloted a Guest Experience measure as part of the Touch Point Project and aim to improve this. Similarly, a centralised guest feedback solution was investigated and successfully piloted. We aim to improve both measures and link them potentially to a spectrum of tools that will assist us in building customer insight for the Group.

Focus on planned initiatives for the coming year

The key focus areas and initiatives planned for the coming year include:

♠	Evolving and structuring our Group’s Customer Strategy to support our segmentation models and the alignment of sales, marketing and service initiatives so that our Customer Value Propositions are increasingly relevant to our customer needs and wants.
♠	Entrenching Touch Point processes and standards to improve service delivery and create differentiation through unique, thrilling experiences that are consistently delivered by our people.
♠	Enhancing and entrenching the use and acceptance of the RM solution in our business.
♠	Improving the insight we have about our MVGs as we focus on continuous data capture and data quality through the RM solution.
♠	Improving the effective use and management of our Customer Interactions Channels, for example; customer contact centre, website, mobile, social media etc., and other channels.
♠	Researching and conceptualising the evolution of our MVG loyalty programme so that we can create value for our customers and the Group with a Group-wide loyalty offering.
♠	Improving our customer insight capability through measurements such as “great experience” and centralised guest feedback. This will help us to improve our performance across operational areas, and ensure that we can learn and adjust our business to remain consistently customer centric as the needs of our customers change.

Previous: Protect our business and innovate

Next: Business partners and communities