BURLINGTON, MA, April 9, 2001—Harrah's Entertainment, Inc., the most recognized and respected name in the casino-entertainment industry, doesn't like to gamble with the success of its IT solutions. With 21 casinos in 17 different markets, Harrah's needed a scalable, powerful business intelligence solution to help extract insight and understanding from its data warehouse, which contains information on more than 19 million customers. Harrah's chose an enterprise solution from Cognos® (NASDAQ:COGN; TSE;CSN), the world's largest and most successful business intelligence company.

In the highly competitive gaming market, the need to attract and retain customers is critical to business success. Using Cognos' business intelligence solution for CRM, Harrah's has been able to better target its marketing campaigns and even offer tailor-made packages to clients based on their individual gaming preferences.

"Using Cognos in our Total Rewards® card program, we can track each players' gaming patterns and preferences across our 21 locations in the United States," said Tracy Austin, Vice President of Development. "By uncovering trends in the data, Cognos BI allows us to determine the destination, dining, and gaming choices of our customers. Using this insight, we are able to build complimentary and special offer programs that are customized to the individual customers. This level of customer service has been unheard of in the casino entertainment world -- until now."

In 2000, Harrah's Entertainment received the prestigious Best Practices in Data Warehousing Award from The Data Warehousing Institute (TDWI) in recognition of the highly successful Total Rewards customer-loyalty program - today driving double-digit same-store sales growth. Cognos and NCR both play a strategic role in this customer-focused IT initiative.

The Cognos implementation has also helped to debunk certain business myths. Industry experts once believed that players had fierce loyalty to one location, but Cognos' cross-market analysis has revealed that players enjoy moving from resort to resort and city to city, allowing for more options when building special offer programs. The total solution has resulted in a smarter, more focused communication with customers and the ability to maximize each customer relationship.

Harrah's Entertainment chose to deploy the Cognos solution based on the flexibility, breadth and depth of the solution, as well as Cognos' strategic partnership with NCR.

"Cognos provides employees at Harrah's Entertainment with the tools they need to dig deep into customer data and retrieve insight that contributes to their competitive edge," said Ben Plummer, vice president of marketing at Cognos. "With Cognos, they have taken their CRM efforts to entirely new heights and have been recognized by the entire industry for their leadership in customer loyalty initiatives."

Harrah's Entertainment Inc.
Founded more than 60 years ago, Harrah's Entertainment, Inc. is the most recognized and respected name in the casino entertainment industry, operating 21 casinos in 17 markets in the United States under the Harrah's, Showboat, Rio and Players brand names. With a combined database of more than 19 million players, Harrah's is focused on building loyalty and value with its targeted customers through a unique combination of great service, excellent products, unsurpassed distribution, operational excellence and technology leadership.

More information about Harrah's Entertainment, the leading consumer-marketing company in the gaming industry, can be obtained at www.harrahs.com.