Vol. 5, No. 4, April 2008
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Family Reunion
Showboat Super Tracy Kileen found that her kindness rewarded with a great job—and lots of Asian
Tracy Kileen’s heart was in the right place three years ago. The Egg Harbor City native, who worked at Showboat from 1987 to 1996 before spending nine years at Mohegan Sun, returned to help her elderly parents.
Presto, the kindness was returned. Kileen was welcomed back to the casino she helped open, and now serves as its table games supervisor (the equivalent of the floor person’s job she left).
“It was wonderful to come back home,” Kileen says. “At first it looked like I may help in a family restaurant business, but when I saw the amount of work it entailed as opposed to the casinos, it looked like a 24-7 job. Fortunately, the casino manager at Showboat had worked with me at Mohegan Sun and came here as a casino manager. He suggested I apply if I was interested.”
Was she ever. Kileen had dealt in Atlantic City from 1983 through 1988, got a promotion at Showboat and was then hired on a whim, over the phone, to be a pit manager in Connecticut. She left Atlantic City on good terms and found the bridge open for a return.
“This was another great offer,” Kileen says. “One thing you notice is how expensive health care is when you’re on your own, and now it’s practically free. What you also notice is that this was a great job to come back to. People were waiting and welcomed me the first day. It was a comfortable thing to see that people had stayed at the property—it was a chance for me to come back to family.”
The family, meanwhile, has gone high-tech. Customer service has become a science, not simply a mindset. Technology has improved the capability of supervisors. A manager can touch a screen to rate players or record their actions, never taking her eye off the game.
“We’ve come so far in the area of customer service. With the screens, your attention is not taken from the game by having to write so much stuff down,” says Kileen. “It’s great.”
So is the diversity. Kileen deals with several cultures and realizes the importance of sensitivity, especially with the lucrative Asian market.
“You can have Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese or Russian players on a given day. We have the same players come in; you get to know them by name. Some bring you little candies and the Asian ladies bring in Asian pears. The job is a lot of fun. You understand what the players want and you know about the superstitions, which are very important.
“We’ve had Asian awareness training on our property. Some of the important things are not to touch them on the shoulder, the players don’t like the number four or 14, they do love the color red and they love to step up into something, like into the pit, rather than step down.”
Kileen believes a supervisor’s main contribution is to be fair with employees and back them up. Showboat recently tapped her to participate in the Employee Engagement Committee, which takes employee suggestions for improvement to top managers. It’s likely that a number of ideas will be implemented. This is, after all, her first quarter of a century in the business.
