Harrah's Entertainment hits the efficiency jackpot with Force.com

Challenge

• The world's largest gaming company needed a technology platform to manage its VIP clients more effectively and efficiently
• Required a platform that used decision science and behavior segmentation
• Had been using a highly customized proprietary system based on technology from a vendor that went out of business in 2003
• As a result, the existing system was frozen, and requests for enhancements were routinely denied because of the complexity and high cost

Solution

• Chose salesforce.com over other vendors for ease of customization and no-hassle deployment
• Rolled out the Force.com cloud platform in 2004 and quickly expanded from a handful of users to more than 1,000 current users of Unlimited Edition, culminating in the creation of a new custom platform called SMART (a sales, marketing, and relationship tool)
• Deployed the SMART platform at 40 properties in early 2010
• Custom apps included in the Salesforce platform
  
  • A Human Resources app to manage talent acquisition
  • A custom app for room reservations called Roomforce that grew to handle 100,000 reservations a year
  • A player-tracking system called Players Exchange to replace an outdated system that ran on Windows 1995
• Regular attendance at Dreamforce inspired managers to explore additional ways cloud computing could increase operational efficiencies
• Integrated with multiple systems, including a casino management system and a hotel management system
• Salesforce.com Premier Support, included in Unlimited Edition, loaded several hundred communications templates and created more than 600 dashboards so users could easily track performance metrics in real time
• Planning to test Salesforce Chatter and mobile access in 2010

Results

• Flexibility of the salesforce.com solution lets business owners make enhancements independent of IT, making the company more agile and responsive
• Employees are more successful because they now have all the information they need at their fingers, thanks to multiple integrations with other systems
• Can execute highly targeted sales and marketing efforts
• Boosted efficiency by replacing time-consuming manual processes that sometimes took days with online workflows that take minutes or seconds