The Hong Kong Jockey Club: Transforming Customer Experience Through Information Technology

For over 125 years, the Hong Kong Jockey Club ("the Club") had been Hong Kong's sole organizer of horseraces. Although it had made horserace betting a popular game in Hong Kong, its customers were aging. To change this, the Club launched a project to make the game more enjoyable for its customers of the technology-savvy generation. Based on market research and the latest technological developments, the project team set out to transform the customers' journey from studying horses to placing a bet. It wanted to develop large multi-touch tables with an integrated smartcard payment system. But this meant major technical and organizational hurdles along the way. After two years the Club launched the world's largest betting entertainment tables. This teaching case describes the Club's project from defining the problem to evaluating its innovation, emphasizing the importance and difficulties of customer-oriented design.