London Club's International's Nick Grimshaw tells Simon Liddle about the new enhancements made to player rewards

UK-based casino operator London Clubs International, part of Harrah’s Entertainment, recently re-launched its Player Rewards loyalty programme with a number of new features. Adapting its parent company’s highly successful Total Rewards scheme, LCI is aiming to provide a more market-specific programme tailored to the needs of its British customers.
"Players now get twice the level of points for the same amount of play as they previously did," Nick Grimshaw. director of loyalty marketing at LCI, told InterGaming. "We’ve also introduced points earning for food and drink purchases.

"We re-launched the programme in March and, although it will be continually evolving as we add new features, we believe that those two things make it the market leader at the moment."

The changes made to the programme are expected to attract a greater number of players, particularly those towards the lower end of the scale.
"It basically means we give more return on customers’ play than any other casino group," Grimshaw continued. "It means customers get their rewards - whether its food and drink redemptions, merchandise redemptions etc. - in effectively half the time than they previously did. Now it’s more appealing to some lower-end players who may have previously felt disenfranchised in a way by thinking ‘it’s going to take me ages to get that iPod or meal for two’. Now we’re seeing a lot more people signing up to the programme because the rewards are more attainable."
So far the response to the re-launched programme has been very positive, with LCI’s loyalty measurements, showing an improvement in visitation and new customer enrollment.

"I think that’s testament to the programme in a way that not only is it retaining the existing customers we have but we’re also seeing a new influx of people that are new-to-brand," Grimshaw said. "The more bodies we get into the clubs is great obviously from a general revenue perspective, but the more players we know about and that we have information on, the better the chance we have of building a relationship with those people and encouraging them to stay with us.

"Ultimately the programme doesn’t work in isolation. Customer service is also paramount because you can have the greatest loyalty programme in the world but if there’s a disassociation with the casino staff you’re going to be undone very quickly. So there’s a two pronged approach: a focus on customer service and the implementation of these new changes to the programme."

Customer service plays an integral role in another new facet of Player Rewards, Monogram, a card reserved for LCI’s top customers. The new VIP-tier card, which has a distinctive black design, is intended to encourage high-end customers to take advantage of the rewards on offer.

"Monogram, in particular, has been very positive. Up to now VIPs were slightly reticent to show their VIP cards. Most are known by sight anyway, which helps enormously, but now they’ve got a black card and are different to everybody else in the main, we’re seeing a lot more actually flashing it at every point to ensure they get their benefits and so other gamers recognise their status," Grimshaw commented. "That’s something we hadn’t necessarily anticipated but we’re very encouraged by the way that’s going."

According to Grimshaw, such enhancements to the existing programme ensure that LCI is moving towards the kind of loyalty programme it believes the UK market wants. Harrah’s’ Total Rewards may have been the original template but the company’s adaptations ensure that Player Rewards is targetted more specifically at its own customers.

He said: "The problem we had was when Player Rewards was introduced it was very much a Total Rewards-lite, if you like - very much the same model but for a UK market without the US casino amenities. We want to make sure our loyalty programme still has the core of Total Rewards but in a way that is more relevant to the UK market. The other reason we changed it was that, while the programme was doing well, we didn’t feel it was operating at its optimum level. I think also all loyalty programmes were all very comparable and there wasn’t one that you could literally look at, either on paper or physically as a card, that wasn’t discernibly the best.

"We want to be the market leader so we’ve gone out there and said ‘okay, we believe in what we’re doing so we’ll give you twice as much as we’ve given before’. At the moment, players are embracing the new changes, which is fantastic."