Harrah's Web-Site Upgrade Boosts TrafficHarrah's Web-Site Upgrade Boosts Traffic

There's probably no harder customer to cozy up to than a poker player. But Harrah's Entertainment Inc. believes its new Web site will help build an intimate understanding of what its customers want--and help bring in the business of the world's highest rollers.

Unlike most sites in the travel industry, Harrahs.com, which relaunched this month, is designed not just to sell rooms, but also to maximize profits by selling them to the most lucrative customers. Like Harrah's offline loyalty program, the new E-Total Rewards program offers personalized benefits and "comps" designed to increase the number of times customers frequent the company's 21 casinos under the Harrah's, Rio, and Showboat brands. It also lets customers communicate preferences like a king or queen bed, smoking or nonsmoking room, and to enter a credit-card number to which all rooms can be charged.

The site upgrade has pushed online traffic from 120,000 customers in June to 500,000 through July 25, and the average time they spend on the site from 11 to 13.51 minutes, says VP of loyalty marketing David Norton.

The next phase of the system, which will link to Harrah's internal inventory systems, will let customers book that free room or discounted dinner in real time on the site, says Tim Stanley, VP of IT development. Also on the agenda are a new call-center interface and an E-mail management system from Apac Customer Services Inc., which will handle customer communications for both the Web site and the call center.

The E-commerce architecture is hosted internally at Harrah's, largely on RS/6000 and SB2 servers from IBM. The system uses WebSphere Web-server architecture, a variety of Windows NT elements for the presentation layer, and a human-resources database that includes thousands of online resumes. The CRM system is "largely homegrown," he says, with some tools from Cognos Inc. and other proprietary tools for accessing the operational and enterprise databases.