The Directors of one of the largest European chains of casinos were worried that their customer service standards were costing them market share through clubs whose performance was falling behind. In particular, they were worried that their dealers (the crews working directly with the customers at the gaming tables) were not seen as customer-friendly and in some cases, were even seen as rude and uncaring - as if they had been trained to put players off. Rather than simply design and install a company-wide customer care training programme, PEC decided to approach the problem from another direction. We wanted to find out why the dealers were behaving and communicating coldly and superficially towards customers despite having received copious amounts of customer care training; it seemed strange that staff who could be the subject of substantial tipping would want to be rude at all to the very people who might reward them just a few minutes later.


We began by visiting all the teams in every casino in turn both to speak informally with the Dealers, Pit Bosses, Floor Managers and the levels above and to have a taste of what customer-oriented behaviours and attitudes the players were experiencing. We also conducted telephone interviews with a wide variety of former customers to find out why they had allowed their memberships to lapse. We also tried to get a feel for the casino culture, not only in this country but in both mainland Europe and in the U.S. We were keen to find out if the problems of team communication between directors and staff lower down being experienced by our client were shared across the industry and across cultures. It seemed that our clients, compared to their colleagues around the world, were making some simple but substantial behaviour-based leadership errors resulting in a counter-productive pit team communication style with winning customers. We suspected that these communication problems were very much to do with the negative attitudes towards winners that the casino executive and managers harboured and the way in which these attitudes, and the feelings that went with them, came across in communication with customers through the teams in the gaming pit.

The core of our intervention focussed upon senior team development - helping the Directors of the chain, to view their customers as being truly valuable whether they were winning money away from a particular establishment’s bottom line or were contributing money to it by losing. We helped them to revolutionise the way in which the whole chain of command, from top to bottom, reacted to poor or strong trading figures (which were monitored hour-by-hour at the casino level and daily at a group level). We worked with the leadership team of the chain to more obviously encourage, recognise and reward genuine warmth and a positive communication style in customer-facing staff. As part of installing these cultural changes the organisation subsequently redesigned its remuneration packages to properly recognise the contribution to revenue of the customer-facing team.

Despite fierce competition, both on and off line, the chain remains one of the market leaders in Europe.