Hospitality - Opportunities
Improve the Guest Experience - Leverage Technology to Serve the Guest Anywhere, Anytime
One important way hotels are working to increase revenue is by delivering guest services that increase customer loyalty and satisfaction. When implemented correctly and consistently, this improved service in turn leads to increased up-sell and cross-sell rates.
Customers call and always reach the party they need to reach. Contact centers help, rather than hinder, getting questions answered. Guests can receive information and request services from any location and through many media.This helps hotels, resorts, casinos and other providers deliver personalized and responsive customer interactions every time, deepening customer relationships and selling more services. Hotel staff and customer service agents can bring more expertise to interactions and still deliver first-call resolution, so that when they hang up the phone, the issue is resolved.
This is made possible for even the most complex requests and questions by providing staff with vastly more capable communications resources. Employees become a gateway to the full expertise of the enterprise, enabling them to access an extended multilingual workforce with the knowledge to answer a customer's questions.
Increase Staff Productivity Levels - Mobility Applications, Seamless Communications
As with any business, hospitality organizations are seeking opportunities to increase operational efficiencies and reduce costs. At the most basic level, IP Telephony and Intelligent Communications can drastically reduce the operational cost for hotel communications, while simplifying the technology and expertise needed to leverage advanced capabilities. Voice and data networks can be consolidated, eliminating duplicative cabling and service contracts and moving guest room communications onto a single converged network. IP Telephony also allows the virtual pooling of separate contact center facilities so calls are spread evenly and fewer total employees are needed to respond to calls effectively.
Guests can quickly access the services they are requesting. Staff members are not interrupted by trivial calls during important tasks, nor do they miss an urgent message because they were outside their office. Offices become truly mobile with calls and messages directed to any device. At a corporate level, workers virtually collaborate and connect to business applications through a variety of devices, identifying stakeholders and coming together in real-time to reach collective decisions. Workforces can be segmented based on roles and responsibilities, and each group can be provided with appropriate communications tools and capabilities to do their jobs better, faster and with less expense.
Reduce Costs - Streamline and Optimize Resources
Hospitality guests, whether traveling on business or leisure, have little patience when they cannot get the services they need. Many operations are time-critical and outages cannot be tolerated since they have an immediate and significant impact on guest satisfaction. Moreover, hospitality is a 24x7 business - hospitality organizations require highly reliable systems so they can consistently deliver services to guests without interruption. Call centers must support dynamic loadbalancing and redirection of calls in the event of an outage or failure. They must also be designed to handle fluctuations in call volumes efficiently and effectively.
The need for reliable and resilient communications has clearly risen in profile with recent world events. Many organizations are reassessing their emergency communications capabilities and are looking at their preparedness for the unexpected. A critical element of any business continuity plan is a reliable communications system. Phones in particular are vital to the timely mobilization of assistance, both personnel and resources.
Intelligent Communications enables calls to be routed to the most appropriate company, emergency and security personnel, as well as to remote locations and affiliated offices. IP Telephony-based solutions, when deployed correctly, are designed to be inherently reliable and provide a platform for developing and deploying Intelligent Communications applications.
Business processes automatically notify the right person, right away, when a guest issue needs resolution. If that person does not respond, the next person in line is contacted, and then the next, until the request is completed or the problem is resolved. Communications are secure both outside and inside the network on every device. If necessary, calls or other forms of communication can be tracked and archived and are available for auditing. Communications networks are resilient with backup capabilities and contingency plans in case of outages, making all but the severest of disruptions invisible to guests.
