Sep 13 2009
The Customer
I want everyone to know that I am a fan of Larry Winget. For those of you that don’t know who he is, I’d like to call him a motivational speaker, but he’d probably give me a tongue lashing for calling him that, so I’ll instead use his own title to describe him … The Pitbull of Personal Development.
I first ran across Larry one day when I was on the road and happened to be sitting in the Detroit Airport. I was stuck there due to a flight delay and had finished the book I always bring with me when I travel. Bored, I headed to the bookstore in the main concourse, and there in the window was a books with the following title screaming out at me (yes, some books can scream) …
“Shut Up, Stop Whining and Get A Life – A Kick-Butt Approach To A Better Life”.
How can you not pick up a book with that for a title?
All I can say is that if you haven’t read it, run, don’t walk to the nearest bookstore, head to Amazon, or find it at the library. I’m not going to go into all the details, but it’s a page turner, and an eye opener. He really cuts to the chase. He has several other books with equally provocative titles (“It’s Called WORK For A Reason”, “You’re Broke Because You Want To Be”, “People Are Idiots And I Can Prove It!” among others).
But I’m not here to sell you on a book(s).
You can also find Larry on YouTube, and as good as his books are, hearing him deliver his message in person (or on video) is something not to be missed. And that is why I am posting today. Before you go any further, please watch this …
Every racetrack Owner, ADW Owner, OTB Owner, General Manager, Board Member, employee of all of the Alphabet Soup of racing organizations, horseman … well you get the idea … should watch this. It’s simple, and cuts right to the point.
I was very fortunate to have a father that is a great racetrack executive to learn from (and boy have I learned a lot). I remember the first time I attended the RTIP Conference in Tucson very clearly to this day. It was December of 1984, and my father was about four months into his first stint as the GM of Canterbury Downs. He was asked to give a speech at the conference, and during that speech he talked about how Canterbury was going to be a customer focused company. Now for a lot of us that attend the various conferences each year, we are used to hearing grandiose plans and great ideas put forth in speeches … and then next year, the same things get talked about again, because nothing happened.
Except at Canterbury Downs.
When the track opened the following year, it was universally praised for having great customer service, even by the news writers that regularly didn’t have much nice to say (we all know how critics are). And the following year at the RTIP Conference my father gave another speech where he told everyone that Canterbury executed, and succeeded. He brought that message back to Canterbury Park with him in 1994, when the Sampson family (who had just bought the track) asked him to be the GM for the second time. Canterbury Park is still a fan-friendly place to this day, and although I am surely biased, I strongly believe that his influence is a big reason why.
I remember my first day at work after being named the GM of what at the time was OhioTab. I had spent my summer working at Canterbury as I had for the previous five years, and was flying back and forth to Ohio to help work on launching WinTicket.com. Charlie Ruma gave me a chance to run the operation after it launched in August of 2000. It was a big leap for me career-wise, and I have to thank him for taking a chance on me. Eventually, that little company became AmericaTab and got a lot bigger, and when it was not so little any more Churchill Downs bought it and its now TwinSpires.com.
From the start, I made sure that AmericaTab was a customer-focused company because of the lessons I had learned from my father. It manifested itself in many ways. We hired more customer service staff than other ADW’s that were handling five times our volume. If you look back at a lot of common features that are available at all the ADW’s now, you would have found a lot of them at AmericaTab first. Our betting platform was simple, worked on most PC and browser combinations, didn’t require software downloads, and was very easy to use. It was fast, and very reliable. We spent a lot of money trying to stay ahead of the curve on our hardware and bandwidth. We had (I believe) the best streaming video and race replay system, and the best handicapping data. We sent checks to our customers that wanted withdrawals from their accounts daily, and initiated online credit card processing and ACH transactions. I even had to fight a little to get rid of the wagering fee that was being charged when I got there, and we spent a long time agonizing about charging for video or services before just putting in a small wagering minimum instead.
I could go on, but we tried very hard to make sure in everything we did that the customer came first. Were we always successful? Unfortunately no, but I heard and saw enough positive reviews from our customers (and significantly fewer negative reviews) to let me know we were doing a lot of things better than our competition.
I could also tell by how fast our business grew.
The Customer Service staff lead by Laura Simmons was a big part of AmericaTab’s success, and other than from me, they probably never got the credit they deserved. I do know that without them and their tireless efforts AmericaTab would not have become the great company it was.
So now I’ve tooted my own horn, my father’s, and Laura’s. But that’s not why I’m posting today either.
If you talk to the bulk of the knowledgeable customers (the gamblers for those that haven’t figured that out yet), they are pretty universal in what makes them happy. They also are not shy about telling you what makes them unhappy if you take the time to listen.
1) They think takeout is too high.
2) They question the integrity of the pools.
3) They believe drugs are rampant in the sport.
4) They hate being held hostage to tracks, groups of tracks, or the horsemen. They believe they should be able to wager on whatever track/pool they want to … through their preferred outlet for wagering.
Now there are countless other smaller things they would love to see too, but these are the big four for most knowledgeable players. You know the 80-20 rule? Guess where 80% of the handle is coming from? Yep, the customers that care about the big four.
Racing needs to remember who the customer really is, and get to work on these things first.
Oh, and If you didn’t watch the YouTube clip, please go back and watch it now … especially if you have a title at work …. 