PGIJANFEBMAGAZINE2021a

10 PUBLIC GAMING INTERNATIONAL • JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2021 am so proud of our team for their vision, astute judgment, and execution as they made sure our players always could continue to play the games they love. And our retailers deserve credit for accommodating the need to do things differently and enable our team to apply creative solutions for keeping the dispensers and ticket vending machines stocked with product. It is amazing and wonderful to see how well our retailers and LSR’s have worked together to serve the players in spite of not being able to meet face-to-face in the stores for large parts of the last nine months. And when LSR’s have been allowed to be in the field, it is only for a maximum of four hours a day, and each store visit must be completed within ten minutes. That can be very difficult when an LSR may have to wait ten minutes to even see the store manager! It takes years to build this kind of trusting relationship between the LSR’s and the retailers, and I so appreci- ate all their efforts and flexibility. The sales force has been tremendous, but our entire organization deserves credit for making everything work so well. The LSR’s depend on support from the entire Kentucky Lottery staff and from our commercial partners like IGT and Scientific Games who kept us flush with instant scratch-off games during a time of unanticipated spikes in demand and severe disruption of supply chains. The pandemic represented a whole new set of unanticipated obstacles to overcome. The leadership of the KLC, and all state lotteries, faced this adversity with ingenuity and the willingness and ability to pivot to make sure we continued to meet our financial obliga- tions while staying consistent with the values of dedicated public servants. And now we are strategically mapping the pathway forward to ensure a bright future for the good causes that depend on lottery funding and for all lottery stakeholders. It seems like adversity brought out the best in everybody. Everybody got their creativity and ingenuity engines going and probably invented solutions that will continue to enhance performance long after the pandemic is over? M. Harville: Absolutely yes. In a way, the pandemic gave us permission to be more decisive and action oriented. The urgency of the situation left no time to over-analyze and conduct ongoing research and discus- sion before taking action. We threw out our SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportuni- ties, Threats) analyses that had been done in December of 2019. Of course, COVID 19 had changed many things, including many of the assumptions of a pre-COVID SWOT. But, as Dwight Eisenhower said, “Plans may be worthless, but planning is everything.” We set about planning for a whole new world. While we had to re-think every- thing, the trends were not altered lock-stock- and-barrel. Many of the trends identified in our original SWOT analysis were just ac- celerated by COVID. For instance, cashless functionality in 1,470 ticket vending machines (TVM’s) was included in our last contract extension with IGT, even though we did not know a pandemic was coming. Now we see even more consumer demand for cashless purchasing, and we are making the implementation of cashless functionality a priority. We hope to have that completed by the end of the FY 2021 (June 30). We also received 575 new Gemini Touch 28s (TVM’s) under the contract extension, and we were concerned that may be too many. That is no longer a concern. Thankfully, these initiatives were already in place prior to COVID. The pandemic just helped us identify our priorities. Likewise, new shopping behaviors like BOPUS (Buy Online, Pick Up in Store) began before the pandemic but are gaining momentum much faster than they would have without the impact of social distancing on in-store shopping. Like other lotteries, we are actively looking for ways to loop lottery into the trend of BOPUS. And even more relevant is iLottery. We had not exactly put iLottery on the front-burner until we saw that the pandemic would cause many consumers to need an alternative to going into the stores to play the lottery or to leaving their homes for other forms of gaming or entertainment. It became very important to ensure that all iLottery functionality was 100% operational and ready for a significant increase in volume and new players. And we were ready, but now we’ve got to be certain that we keep that momentum and keep those new players. We negotiated the extension of our iLottery contract with IGT during the pandemic, and you can bet that this extension included significant enhancements that will keep the Kentucky Lottery ahead of the curve and exceeding player expectations, including the expectations of our new players. We’ll be able to offer more games, include more third-party content, and offer targeted pro- motions. We will also increase the budget for advertising the digital platform. What do you do to encourage your team to embrace the opportunities embedded in times of uncertainty like this? M. Harville: I would point out that the lottery sector has been very fortunate. We have not been beset with the kind of intractable obstacles facing some industries, like airlines and restaurants and many others. We should all be grateful for that good fortune and appreciate the hardship that others are facing through no fault of their own. Our senior management team is seasoned, experienced, and effective at operating the lottery and leading through difficult situa- tions. One of the things that we have done when dealing with issues, even more than before the pandemic, is to re-frame the issues, I feel that everyone on our team is discovering skills they did not know they had and is excited about the impact they are having on the ongoing success of the enterprise. Heavy reliance on inter-departmental task forces is definitely something we will continue into the post-COVID era. PGRI INTERVIEWS