Customers

 
We are starting to see the benefits of our strategy as our customers are experiencing the results of our efforts and investment when they visit our properties.
In the past year, we have made significant progress with our Customer Management (CM) journey towards creating relevant value for our customers and for our business. We are starting to see the benefits of our strategy as our customers are experiencing the results of our efforts and investment when they visit our properties. We will continue to focus on identifying ways in which we can create mutual value through customising our offerings to meet and exceed our customers’ expectations.  
HIGHLIGHTS
We successfully completed the roll out of the One Sun brand alignment programme to +/- 21 000 of our staff, and those of our business partners and concessionaires. The programme engaged all our people in our vision, our brand promise and educated them on the importance of delivery of ‘A Million Thrills. One Destination’ to our customers. 
With the launch and release of four editions of our One Sun Magazine we established a new internal communication channel for our business as well as a vehicle to create sustainability for the One Sun programme to ensure that we keep the messages alive. 
 
The configuration and deployment of our Campaign Management technology to all our gaming properties to improve our marketing capability and to ensure that we improve our ability to build relationships with our MVGs. 
 
Over the past three years, our CM strategy has stood the test and proved to be focusing on the right areas. We will continue to focus our efforts on: 
Repositioning our brand in the minds of our customers through the careful management of their perception and expectations. 
Igniting, motivating and creating passionate employees who deliver in our brand promise when they interact with our customers. 
Consistently delivering unique thrilling, memorable, quality experiences that exceed our customers’ expectations. 
Creating long term, lasting relationships with our customers through learning and remembering what they need and want. 
Delivering relevant value to our customers and our business as we apply our improved understanding of our customers’ requirements.
 
Quality interactions and providing excellent service to our guests who visit our properties are at the centre of our business, and we aim to deliver consistent, memorable, quality guest experiences that fulfil in our brand promise of ‘A Million Thrills. One Destination’. We will continue to strive to establish closer personal relationships with our most valued guests.  
 
PERCEPTIONS
Our new brand promise of ‘A Million Thrills. One Destination’ accurately describes the unique experiences we aim to deliver to our customers when they visit our properties. Our properties each offer a unique experience which contributes to ‘A Million Thrills’, but as a group, we are all part of the Sun International family and we guarantee quality and consistency through the intent of ‘One Destination’.

We live our values of passion, fun, innovation, courage, ethics, teamwork and respect, all focused on our customer requirements. Through strategic and tactical marketing campaigns we have successfully positioned our brand as a leader in the South African gaming and hospitality market and we will continue to manage the perceptions of our customers through marketing our brand via multiple communications channels.
 
INTERACTIONS
Customer touch points are the points of interaction between our guests and our brand. These are also known as ‘contact points’, ‘customer or guest contacts’ or ’points of contact’ or the places where we touch our customers and leave an impression which will influence their perception and confirm our brand promise. Other examples of touch points are our marketing collateral, our website, our sales calls, our corporate communication, our advertising and everywhere our brand is represented. It is the responsibility of each and every person working at Sun International to deliver exceptional service experiences and to ensure that we fulfil in our brand promise when we interact with our guests.

Our internal brand alignment project successfully communicated to all our people the importance of delivering on our brand promise at the moment of truth. The project focused on engaging our people in a fun and informative way to align our behaviour with the group’s new vision and brand promise and to ignite the hearts and minds of our people so that they will focus on ‘how they interact’ with guest versus ’what task they need to perform’. We also share a common purpose at Sun International for our customers, we want to ‘Light up their lives’. 
 
EXPERIENCES
Customers expect to be delighted wherever they find themselves in our wide choice of properties and to ensure that our people are firmly focused on delighting them, they are being trained, empowered and recognised to take ownership for delivering on the brand promise. We want to achieve a guest service vision where our people are consistently delivering memorable, quality experiences that thrill our guests as we exceed their expectation. We aim to achieve this through paying attention to every detail and following our group basic service standards when we interact with guests. 
 
RELATIONSHIPS
We continue to evolve and grow our MVG programme which, with 349 000 active cardholders, is one of the largest and leading loyalty programmes in the gaming industry. Because relationships are our business, we focus on customer retention and ways to improve our corporate memory so that customers can experience the same service across our group and don’t have to repeat themselves. Over the past three years we have been specifying, configuring and testing a technology application which will assist our front-line staff to access relevant information when they need to serve a customer. Our relationship marketing programme will enable us to recognise our customers across our properties, regardless of which properties they visited in the past. This technology based initiative will be rolled out this year, and will considerably enhance our customer database and boost our customer interactions. 
 
RELEVANCE
In a world where everything is becoming faster, easier to access and choice is everywhere, we know that ‘being relevant’ is important to our customers and we will be more easily able to retain them if we address their unique needs. We regularly conduct extensive research to enable us to better understand the needs, perceptions and expectations of our customers. A key driver of the CM programme is the sharing of customer insights and feedback throughout the group to ensure that we supply our customers with improved communication, product and service offerings. 
 
Customers expect to be delighted wherever they find themselves in our wide choice of properties.