ALKHOBAR, 22 March 2005 — At some time or other everyone has probably experienced this typical hotel service scenario:
• A hotel guest telephones the hotel’s Housekeeping Department to report that the room airconditioning is not cooling.
• Housekeeping either creates a job request or phones the hotel’s Engineering Department and informs them that the airconditioning in Room XXX is not cooling.
• Engineering looks for someone to go and investigate the problem. The maintenance staff are all busy and the request is put to the side for later action.
• Since the Housekeeping Department has already transferred the request to Engineering, they forget about it. The clerk in Engineering gets busy doing other tasks and forgets about the request as well.
• The guest waits an hour but no one comes to fix the room’s airconditioning. The guest telephones Housekeeping angrily to inform them about the problem once again.
• Housekeeping starts pointing fingers at Engineering and the shouting begins. All the while the guest’s room airconditioning is still not cooling.
• The overheating guest explodes and promises to avoid the hotel in the future.
Unfortunately, such service scenarios have been all too frequent in the past, even at 5-star establishments. A breakdown in the service chain is a nightmare for hotel management because it is well-known that one dissatisfied guest can dissuade 10 other prospective guests. But technology is now at hand to help prevent such service mishaps and customer centric hotels are investing in these new software applications.
“We wanted to improve our guest services and our ability to react to what our customers need. In light of that we have just installed and opened our Guest Service Center (GSC). The GSC is manned 24 hours a day. It’s a one-touch dial for the guest for any service request,” said Michael Nugent, GM, Le Gulf Meridien Hotel. “People might wonder what’s new about that since many hotels have supposedly ‘one dial’ or ‘one touch’ service. The difference with our GSC is that it’s not simply a person sitting on the other end of a phone line, taking requests and then manually relaying them to the appropriate departments or staff members. Our system is fully computerized. It’s a single point of responsibility for guests’ requests handling.”
Le Gulf Meridien is running Lattice Guest Service Center Software, designed by Lattice Consultancy with active inputs from the management of Le Meridien’s Regional Office and Le Royal Meridien Abu Dhabi. The development of the software started at the beginning of 2004 and was implemented in the first property, Le Royal Meridien Abu Dhabi in June 2004. Overall there are now six Le Meridien properties using the software.
At Le Gulf Meridien when a guest has a service request, he simply presses one button and his call is answered by a GSC staff member. With the minimum of conversation or bother, the details of the service need or problem at hand are logged into the computer. Immediately an SMS is automatically sent to the telephone that the responsible staff member would be carrying.
“We have 14 mobile phones on the go in the hotel. The relevant person is contacted right away. He reads the SMS and responds immediately. As soon as he’s finished he goes to a landline and punches in a four-digit code that will automatically log the job in as completed. It’s all about time management. There’s minimum movement of the staff between jobs so they can respond to the guests faster,” Nugent explained.
If there is no immediate response to a service request, guests don’t have to fret, as there is an escalation process. A time frame has been set for the accomplishment of each task. If the job is not completed within the required time frame, the original SMS request is automatically passed on to a supervisor. The supervisor will contact the individual handling the service request and offer assistance. If there is a failure at the supervisor level to complete the job, the request will be passed on to the head of the department and if there is a failure at that level, then the SMS goes to the hotel’s GM.
“This is fantastic for me because I will rapidly get to know if there is a serious problem that hasn’t been dealt with or a guest’s request that has been overlooked,” Nugent remarked. “I want to emphasize that the objective is that I should never receive one of these relayed messages. All guest requests should be taken care of immediately so there is no need for escalation. All our staff members have been carefully trained. What we have seen immediately is that the staff now realize that they are being measured, so the jobs get done rapidly. Additionally, if a guest claims that the staff didn’t show up for 30 minutes to handle a request and the staff member claims he was there in 10 minutes, I can check the system and immediately know the truth. The data is there in the system in black and white.”
The guest service center software allows the productivity of the staff to be measured. The system highlights the efforts of those hotel staff members who are working hard and also pinpoints those who are hardly working! The system also alerts management when there aren’t enough staff members assigned to certain tasks, so that guests don’t become frustrated with slow service and staff aren’t overwhelmed. Maintenance, housekeeping, laundry, in fact all Le Gulf Meridien’s guest services except for food and beverage room service are handled by the GSC.
“One of the best things about the system are the number of different reports available to me. I can go online 24 hours a day to drill down through them and pinpoint any service problem if need be. For example if laundry requests are beginning to back up, I can look at my resources and move them around to handle the load. I am also analyzing all the reports to ensure that we have the right number of staff assigned to the right duties at the right time. In this way I can better plan work schedules, training, vacations and other staff requirements,” Nugent said. “Using these reports it’s easy to see patterns emerging that perhaps we were unaware of. We can analyze the nature of the requests. We can target peak service times in various areas and have the maximum number of staff on duty. We can also spot maintenance trends, such as requests to unblock drains or fix airconditioners, and perhaps implement preventive maintenance so guests aren’t inconvenienced.”
According to Nugent, choosing the right staff to man the GSC was even more critical than setting up the system. GSC staff had to have a good command of English and Arabic and a high level of understanding of the hotel’s functionality. The GSC staff are backed up by the business center staff if there is an overwhelming number of calls. The hotel plans to have five full time GSC staff.
Creating the GSC is just one of Le Gulf Meridien’s technology initiatives. Nugent explained that in conjunction with his management team and several IT vendors, an IT master plan has been developed for the hotel and they are now racing to implement it.
“Our objective is basically to bring this hotel into the 21st century,” he stated. “Technology has moved forward enormously from when this hotel was built. What we really have in the hotel right now as far as cabling is only telephone cabling. So at the moment we are building in the structured cabling to cover our needs for at least the next five years.”
The structured cabling project has commenced under a local supplier, representing an international vendor. The cabling project will take about six weeks in total to complete. Once finished, every room in the hotel will have three separate cables providing both fixed and wireless Internet connectivity and interactive television.
“With the cabling project is completed we will go live with the high-speed Internet access,” Nugent said. “We’ve looked at other hotels both in the Middle East and Asia and seen the benefits and difficulties that they’ve had with such investments. The provider we’ve chosen has told us that we will have high speed Internet access in the rooms within two months from today. Installing high-speed Internet in the rooms came about due to our analysis of customer feedback. People don’t want to come down to the business center and work any more. Many business people are working on confidential data and they don’t want such information exposed in a public place such as a business center. No one wants to queue up to download e-mail or a Power Point Presentation. So for me high-speed Internet in the rooms is our No. 1 priority.”
While the rooms will get high-speed Internet, WiFi will be set up in the lobby and in some of the banquet rooms as well. WiFi service will be available for a fee to both guests staying at the hotel and individuals just dropping by for a meeting or a cup of coffee. Nugent is aware that while the new technologies will bring many benefits to the hotel and its guests there will be issues too.
“We are currently recruiting some additional people to function as technology butlers,” he said. “These will be people — a pair of legs and a brain, who can go to a room or a banquet hall and solve any technology problem. We expect that 95 percent of the IT problems will be basic but they must be solved quickly to keep our guests happy.”
Le Gulf Meridien will be the first hotel in the Eastern Province to offer this wide array of advanced IT services but Nugent believes that such improvements are required to maintain a competitive edge.
“When we finish, when I look at the GSC, the cabling and all the other hardware that we have to put in, we will probably have invested SR800,000 plus, in total expenditure,” said Nugent. “It’s a considerable investment but for us and the owners here but we have recognized that it’s a necessity. We are a business hotel. Our guests expect such services and we are working hard to meet and exceed their expectations.”
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