Surveillance Upgrade Enhancing the Customer Experience

Combining customer service with security requirements

Hollywood Casino Aurora has upgraded its surveillance system with an integrated solution from Synectics – a decision driven as much by customer service as by security requirements.

With over 1,100 slots, almost 40 tables, including a live poker room to monitor – in addition to the property’s restaurants and hospitality areas – detecting and investigating theft, fraud, and security threats is a priority for the surveillance team. But for Director of Surveillance, Rob Saucedo, one of the biggest reasons for upgrading the current system is to support repeat business growth by enhancing customer experience.

Rob said, “On average, around 3,000 guests come through our doors daily, most of whom live locally – we are not what you might term a vacation destination casino. Repeat business is key, which means doing everything we can to offer a high-quality customer experience in every aspect of our operations. There are several ways the new surveillance system is helping us do this.”

Simplified incident investigation

Using Synectics e1600 H.264 encoders, high-quality footage from the site’s 500-plus analogue cameras is converted to digital video. With Synergy, operators can then ‘live view’, control, record, and review this footage on the IP monitor walls in the surveillance control room, and set up customised alerts to automatically detect specific incident scenarios.

Rob said, “We’ve been operating a purely DVR system for the past 10 years or so. It facilitated high-quality image capture but had its drawbacks – for example, when reviewing any incidents, we could only proceed with one camera at a time. With the new system, we can review multiple cameras in real-time and at up to 24x the original speed. Combined with the intuitive and user-friendly interface, incident investigation is a vastly simpler and faster process.

“In turn, this enables us to deal with customer service issues far more efficiently – ‘credit theft’ complaints being a key area. Playing credits that another guest has left on a machine is effectively theft and something we take very seriously. A guest with credits still to play may have moved away to take a call, fetch a drink, or visit the restroom. For them to return and find another player has essentially spent their money is unacceptable.

“The surveillance system upgrade ensures that our team of operators can investigate at such a speed that we can often identify the culprit while they are still on the premises and retrieve any of the taken funds.

“With multiple levels of failover protection, including hot-swap and RAID redundancy for all recorded footage, the reassurance is also there that we will always have the data at our fingertips to investigate any claim, even in the event of a network failure. These are real-value benefits to us and our customer base.”

Improving operational strategy

“People often think gaming surveillance is entirely about fraud or theft detection”, said Rob, “but actually it can be a vital management tool. With our solution, for example, we can detect scenarios such as cage lines exceeding certain lengths. This enables us to respond by informing management so that staffing levels can be adjusted to better serve our guests. Also, through Synergy’s in-built analytics and reporting functionality, we can easily look for trends to help inform future staffing, stock, or security decisions. It all supports our goal to deliver the best experience possible for our guests.”

While the surveillance upgrade is already helping Hollywood Casino Aurora realise many immediate benefits, a crucial consideration during the specification process was system longevity – the ability to adopt emerging technologies easily and organically. Synectics has developed a solution for Aurora that offers future-proofed flexibility.

A solution for both current and future needs

The Hollywood Casino Aurora upgrade serves two purposes; an immediate step change in capability and usability, and a step towards future expansion and enhancement.

The transition was seamless and, by implementing the new Synergy system in tandem with Aurora’s existing DVR-based operations, there was minimal disruption and zero downtime. The property now has a solution that meets existing needs, with storage capacity and a system structure that will easily accommodate further digital migration.

Rob said: “We have already begun introducing IP camera technology – without doubt this is the future. But navigating away from analogue to entirely IP is not a feasible single-step process. Synergy’s open platform architecture means we can migrate gradually, as time and budget permit. It also means that we can easily introduce more sophisticated data integrations, for example, point-of-sale and player systems.

Hollywood Casino Aurora is one of 16 Penn Gaming properties to adopt a Synectics surveillance system, and one of over 100 gaming properties worldwide.

“Through Synergy’s in-built analytics and reporting functionality, we can easily look for trends to help inform future staffing, stock, or security decisions. It all supports our goal to deliver the best experience possible for our guests.”

Rob Saucedo, Director of Surveillance, Hollywood Casino Aurora