Customer story: Mohegan

The situation

Mohegan introduced its current customer loyalty program, Momentum, in 2013. Since then, Mohegan has grown rapidly to operate multiple properties as well as expand guest offerings. In early 2021, Mohegan increased its online presence with the introduction of online betting and ticket booking service through its apps with the purpose of creating a top-notch digital experience. A key goal for Mohegan: ensure a seamless experience where guest shave one main user account across all of their brands and properties.

While Mohegan was looking to securely expand online services for its guests, Don Assalone, director of global cybersecurity, saw it as an opportunity to update the underlying infrastructure including the sign-in process and security protocols for customer accounts.

“At the time, we were using an online registration process that we had developed internally,” said Don. “There was more friction in our customer sign-up process than we wanted, and we were seeing higher abandonment rates as a result. We wanted to do two things: really make sure we were using modern security protocols, but also make sure that our guests had the same quality and secure experience online as they do when they visit one of our properties.”

Evaluating CIAM options

As Mohegan considered their requirements, they knew they wanted a customer identity and access management (CIAM) solution that would secure their customers’ sign-in experience.

As a gaming and hospitality company they also had several additional requirements that were unique to their business. These included:

• Creating a consistent brand experience across multiple sites:
  With eight different properties in their portfolio Mohegan needed a CIAM solution that would let them keep branding consistent across all of their properties while also allowing individual properties to customize the experience as needed.
• Adding identity verification and consent management:
  To reduce account takeover (ATO) and fraud risk they needed their new solution to remotely confirm guests’ identities.
• Minimal development effort:
  The CIAM solution had to be easy to integrate with their player databases and online gaming platform without requiring significant development resources from their internal engineering team.

“It was important that the solution be easy to implement. We were asking questions like ‘How much coding and support infrastructure is required? How much care and feeding will it take?’” said Don. “Those were all important considerations for us. We were deploying a progressive security solution and we wanted to make sure that it was something that wouldn’t break the organization as we rolled it out across all our properties.”

Aer evaluating several well-known workforce IAM providers, it quickly became clear to the Mohegan team that traditional workforce-oriented providers were cumbersome to use for customer-oriented scenarios and often came with significant services and expenses. In fact, Strivacity was the only CIAM vendor that offered to do a true proof of concept (POC) so Mohegan could see how the solution would work in their environment.

“Updating security protocols for a 26-year-old organization requires a partner who purposely builds solutions with customers in mind and has security at the forefront,” said Don.

“We felt like there was a natural fit with Strivacity. We have the same beliefs that customers should be front and center. Security is in Strivacity’s DNA. That combined with the fact that Strivacity was so easy to deploy and scale up convinced us they were the best solution.”
– DON ASSALONE
Director of Global Cybersecurity

Preparing for launch

Strivacity completed most of the technical configuration during the proof of concept.

The new sign-in process was a significant change since Mohegan was asking each guest to reconfirm their account. To prepare Mohegan’s guest services team, Strivacity held several training sessions. They walked the guest services representatives through different scenarios so they could help guests quickly troubleshoot error codes related to account sign-ins.

Within two weeks after signing the contract, Mohegan went live with the new Strivacity CIAM solution – first at ilani Casino Resort, followed closely by Mohegan Casino Las Vegas, Mohegan Sun and Mohegan Pennsylvania.

“One thing that worked to our success was that we launched Strivacity at one of our smaller properties first,” said Erica Tessier Hunt, vice president of corporate marketing for Mohegan.

“We had to determine the best way to inform and assist our guests, how to communicate the updates to our team members and roll out processes to handle different situations.”

Benefits of partnering with Strivacity

Today, Strivacity powers Mohegan’s Momentum loyalty program by giving over 200,000 Mohegan guests a secure sign-in experience that creates simpler pathways for guests to book reservations and check their points balance. Strivacity also enables loyalty members in Connecticut to connect their Momentum account to Mohegan’s online gaming offerings. This allows guests to earn Momentum Dollars from bets placed via linked MoheganSunCasino.com and FanDuel accounts.

“Strivacity was the best solution, and is now a critical partnership for us. It went live within two weeks. The implementation was significantly cheaper than the other solutions we looked at and we haven’t had to hire anyone to manage the platform.”
– DON ASSALONE
Director of Global Cybersecurity

The Mohegan team was particularly impressed with how Strivacity’s team members have supported them.

“I can’t emphasize the power of Strivacity’s people enough,” said Erica. “Throughout this entire process, it has been a partnership. We are not just a client, we are partners. IT security is scary. And because the Strivacity team did such a good job of making us comfortable, we were able to, in turn, make our team members and the guests feel more comfortable as well. That was a huge factor in the success of the project,” said Don Assalone.

Susanne Colle, director of loyalty marketing at Mohegan added on, “The Strivacity team was so adaptable and friendly. From the start, it felt like they were a part of the Mohegan team.”

Integrating with Mohegan’s player systems

Integrating with Mohegan’s player systems was a critical requirement to support online identity verification. Each property at Mohegan has its own player system, which made it important to have a platform that could easily handle the differences across the different player systems and translate them into a single guest experience.

Strivacity takes input from guests and verifies it against data such as their phone number, which is stored in the player systems. Strivacity’s low-code Lifecycle Event Orchestration™ capability made it straightforward for Mohegan to integrate directly with those systems and layer in verification policies to strengthen security while providing a simple guest experience.

“As a gaming and hospitality organization, we have a lot of complexity within our IT environment. Some vendors really struggle to fit into it with their proposed solutions,” said Don.

“Strivacity’s low-code orchestration environment made it easy to integrate with our key systems without the need fora big engineering and professional services project.”

Strivacity benefits

1. Guest Experience

Once a guest completes the verification process, they receive full access to all online account-based services so they can access entertainment tickets, promotions, book hotel rooms, make reservations and more.

Guests are also now able to reset passwords and retrieve forgotten usernames without having to speak with the customer service team.

“Strivacity made it possible for guests to easily manage their accounts the way they want to... that was a primary goal of launch as well as being extremely important.”
– ERICA TESSIER HUNT, VP Corporate Marketing

Another key benefit of Strivacity’s low-code platform was the speed with which Mohegan was able to make improvements to the guest experience. Once the solution was live, Strivacity and Mohegan monitored it closely. Based on the activity they saw, the Strivacity team made adjustments to make things even more intuitive for guests.

For example, Mohegan identified that a group of frequent guests didn’t have email accounts. The team quickly turned on functionality so guests could reset their passwords via their phone (cell phone or landline) – not just by email. In another case, Strivacity restricted the categories of identity verification questions presented to guests because some guests felt some topics were too sensitive.

“The Strivacity team was very responsive.”

“We made some really significant changes for an improved user experience. We were identifying items and Strivacity responded, ‘Oh, we’ll have that fixed in an hour … or by tomorrow,” said Erica.

More recently, when Mohegan went through a rebranding exercise – updating the logo, revising messaging, and implementing a brand refresh was a multi-hour exercise, nota multi-month exercise. Within 15 minutes the updates were deployed and live at each property.

2. Low maintenance costs

Since Strivacity is a cloud-native SaaS CIAM platform, another important benefit for Mohegan was that they didn’t have to purchase additional infrastructure to deploy it. Plus, Strivacity’s low-code approach means that Mohegan’s IT team only spends a few hours each month to maintain the system.

“The fact that Strivacity is a low-code platform is important to us.”

“We had one of our developers make sure we had the right coding on our website when we launched. But, since then, there has been little required from an IT perspective,” said Don.

3. Centralized (& secure) identity verification

To meet Mohegan’s stringent security requirements and simplify account management for customers, Strivacity implemented several identity verification techniques including knowledge-based verification. When required, customers affirm their identity by answering questions only they could possibly know. Questions are generated and answers matched via Strivacity’s integration with a third-party credit bureau.

As a result, Mohegan and its customers gained a higher level of confidence in account security across the board, eliminating risks that can arise from log-in protocols that rely solely on customer-managed PINs.

4. Guest Services

As a premier hospitality organization, it was important to provide the Mohegan guest service teams with support for when they would encounter a guest unable to login. Strivacity provided the guest services team with access to a portal that allowed them to troubleshoot and resolve issues directly on the Strivacity platform.

“The Strivacity team arrived prepared and did an excellent job coaching our guest services team.”

“They provided a training packet and talked us through the error codes and how to properly handle issues. We have felt very confident managing guest expectations and are able to talk them through any situation that would arise.”

Erica added, “I have biweekly calls with the marketing leads at every property, and customer registration and sign-in is not a topic that comes up which is a good thing. It’s seamless at this point and that was our mission.”

“Our guests appreciate the ease of having a single account to access our offerings, and they expect – and deserve –lock-tight security for their accounts, with Strivacity, we can give them that and more as we continue to grow.”
– DON ASSALONE, Director of Global Cybersecurity