Think of those times when you are sitting in a restaurant looking at the menu. After you make up your mind, the waiter notes down your choices, and takes your order. He then goes on and passes the note in the kitchen and after what often seems a pretty long wait, you find yourself gorging on the food of your choice.
Now re-imagine this scenario but with a dash of high tech: put a tablet PC or a similar handheld into the picture. On its interactive, touch-screen menu, the waiter suavely selects the food items you would like to order, notes recipe preferences, and clicks a button that straightaway sends it to the kitchen over a wireless network. In this case the wait time for your favourite food is much less.
The first scenario is what we typically find in most restaurants today. However, the second one seems new, and gives an idea of an ordering process that involves an interactive experience and lesser waiting time.
A similar contrast exists in hotels, wherein the majority of properties have manual customer-facing processes and are yet to adopt IT in a big way. Yet, given that the hospitality sector is poised for growth and customer expectations have shot up, such innovative communication tools and applications are just what the sector needs to enhance customer experience.
According to James Thomas, Country Head, Kronos India, “The hospitality sector in the country sees 5.6 million overseas visitors per year. The country currently has about 200,000 rooms and seeing a shortfall of close to a 100,000 rooms.”
This means that there is tremendous opportunity for the sector to bring in more customers and retain the existing ones, through added features and services, with a unified communication experience and value added mobility.
The new way
In the early days it was just the EPABX infrastructure that not only helped with intra-hotel communication but also acted as a revenue driver for hotels, with guests using the phone lines for local and international calls (and paying high call charges). But the scenario drastically changed with the advent of cellular phones.
Also, given that consumers use mobiles, tablets and other devices for data access, organisations in the hospitality sector are looking at having a strong network connectivity in place: one that can serve both voice and data requirements of the customer, wired or unwired.
Scott Thomson, GM of Hilton and DoubleTree by Hilton, Mayur Vihar, New Delhi shares a similar opinion: “A lot of clients today travel with up to three devices, which could include a smart phone, a tablet PC or a laptop. The focus is to ensure that we provide strong and reliable access to the Internet to both our business and leisure customers.”
IP telephony takes over
As in the case of organisations in other verticals, the hospitality sector could also benefit from switching over to an IP-based telephone network—which can not only provide a scalable option for telephony but the same infrastructure can also be used to deliver video and data.
This could prove a lot useful in the hotel room, where an interactive GUI-based IP phone could replace the traditional telephone and provide a host of services to enhance the guest experience. On the other hand, the IP-based network can be extended to employees and speed up communication between them, through features such closed user groups and audio conferencing.
A few hotels have already started implementing these solutions. For instance, Hotel Leela Kempinski in Gurgaon is using IP-based telephones from Avaya to provide in-room services such as food menu, flight schedule, butler service, etc, besides the standard telephony features that a traditional phone would offer.
Vendors such as Avaya are also offering an IP telephony solution that can be deployed at the employee end. With the solution, the employee’s mobile phone acts as an extension to his desk phone in a way that all calls outside office hours, or when he is out of office, are routed to his cell phone.
Through a soft VoIP client, the IP telephony functionalities for the guest phone can also be extended to his mobile phone or a cellular phone provided by the hotel so that the guest can make or receive calls on the mobile phone, even outside the hotel within the city, when on the move.
A technology Indian hotels have adopted in big measure is audio conferencing: several major hotels in India today provide audio conferencing facilities in the meeting rooms and business centres for corporates. Some have even set up video conferencing rooms especially for corporate customers.
Deepak Braganza, Country Manager, LifeSize India & South Asia, says, “A lot of hotels are already offering video-as-a-service through meeting rooms, for both in-house guests and customers specifically looking for video conferencing services. The next big thing from a video conferencing point of view would be in-room video conferencing using the LCD/LED television screens and a camera.”
The mobility wave
Most organisations in the hospitality sector have a workforce which is largely mobile within or around the premises. While restaurants have waiters constantly moving between tables and the kitchen, large multi-star hotels are usually spread across a large property or multiple floors in a building. In this case the hotel staff is constantly on the move, trying to service customers as quickly as possible.
Traditionally, most hotels have employees using radio ‘walkie-talkies’ or pagers to communicate while on the move. Even the desk staff uses a similar infrastructure to communicate with colleagues who might be spread across different areas of the hotel property. Needless to say, mobility is a critical part of this industry’s business.
Today, almost every employee in a hotel would have a mobile device for communication. Many hotel guests now carry more than one mobile device and this has been opening up a lot of opportunities for improving communication across the enterprise, be it between employees, or between the hotel and guests.
For instance, mobile devices could find an adoption at the concierge level, wherein the hotel staff could use the mobile device to check in guests. Many hotels today have business intelligence and CRM tools that are integrated with their hotel management system or property management system to give a unified view of the customer. Making this information available to the hotel staff on their mobile devices, as they engage with a customer, could have a tremendous impact on customer experience.
“Having such a tool allows them to up-sell and target the customer with better campaigns. This has a direct revenue correlation since if the customer enters the hotel and the staff does not acknowledge the customer in an informed manner, it impacts the customer experience in a negative manner,” says Godika.
For instance, if a returning guest, after a long travel, comes to check in and has to wait in line along with, say, five other guests to complete the process, it could leave him a little unhappy. Hotels can therefore look at a mobile device that allows its executives to engage with customers as they enter the hotel and help them check in. Hotel executives could also be walking around with mobile devices with applications that help them answer guest queries better and guide them in the right direction.
“While they might take a slower approach towards adopting some of the other communication tools, having a unified view of the customer available in real-time and on-demand on mobile devices is something that hotels are increasingly focusing on,” adds Godika.
What is more, the mobile experience can also be extended to the hotel guest rooms, wherein the guest can have all in-room controls delivered on a mobile device that he could also carry around. This device can give access to all in-room controls such room service, television, lighting and air conditioning and also provide access to certain areas in the property. From the hotel’s point of view, the same device can be used to push targeted offers and campaigns to the guest and up-sell other services to him.
AGC Networks, for instance, provides a similar solution called DigiValet for hotels wherein using a mobile device, the guest can have options such as room service and housekeeping. He can also control various components of the room such as lighting, air conditioning and drapes, in addition to TV controls with features such as movies on demand—thereby eliminating the need for multiple controls.
According to Bhatnagar, ITC Grand Chola in Chennai has deployed AGC Networks’ solution stack to provide the in-room experience on the mobile device to its guests.
“The application can be customized to the guest’s preferences to push offers and promotions and access to areas of the hotel based on the guest’s preferences,” adds Bhatnagar.
Goyal of IBM also gives an example of a hotel in Indore, which is offering in-room services on IP-based phones.
However, a lot of customers might want these applications being available on their own device. From a guest’s point of view, it eliminates the need to carry around another mobile device.
Thomson of Hilton informs that the hotel has a similar application that is available for a free download on iOS, Android and Blackberry OS. “The application which is available for download on our website, gives users quick and easy access to Hilton services. Users can book or change reservations with eCheck-in, access hotel specials, know where to go with GPS and mobile maps integration, call Hilton Reservation and Customer Care (HRCC) and even customize their rooms with Request Upon Arrival,” he says.
Upping productivity
On the one hand, unified communications and mobility can help hospitality firms engage better with customers or improve the customer experience. At the same time, these technologies could be applied to help them ensure better work efficiency and response times among employees.
For instance, Avaya offers a task management solution that forwards all requests from guests to the nearest available staff on his or her cell phone as a notification.
This eliminates the guest having to call room service or housekeeping and then having to wait for the staff to answer the call and provide the service. According to Shetty, one of the hotels using Avaya’s solution has been able to save up to 70 percent costs on staff and has seen a marked improvement in customer satisfaction.
Kronos, which offers workforce management solutions across various segments, has a similar solution that integrates with mobile devices of hotel employees. According to Thomas, in the event of an untimely or uninformed employee absence, the application checks for all other employees within a travel time radius of five to 15 minutes, who have similar skill sets and are available for the day and sends them a message inviting them to replace the absent employee for the day or shift.
He believes that this not only ensures that the business goes on as usual, without staff absence affecting it, but also boosts employee morale and improves employee retention chances, as it gives a fair chance to all of them to take up an opportunity and keeps them motivated to do a job that they enjoy.
Additionally, chat or instant messaging which was initially seen as a frivolous medium that affects productivity, is today increasingly finding acceptance among enterprises for faster employee communication. Goyal of IBM gives an instance of a hotel in Mumbai that uses the drivers’ smart phones to track its fleet cabs and to communicate with and assign them to guests. Happiest Minds’ Godika also gives an example of a hotel in India that has its employees using an instant messenger application to communicate with each other.
Communication next
A lot of organisations in the hospitality sector are just about waking up to newer communication tools. While some of them have at looked IP telephony or using smart phones for better communication, others have adopted simpler methods such as using mobile devices in restaurants to take orders speed up the table-kitchen-table process.
Says Shetty of Avaya, “Almost all major hotels in India today have, to a large extent, integrated their telephony and voice mail systems with their Property Management System (PMS). Around 20 to 30 percent of them have adopted video and audio conferencing solutions, while a similar percentage of organisations have looked at adopting mobile-based solutions.”
More and more hospitality players are beginning to understand the role of new communication tools in an increasingly digital and connected world, and many are making calculated approaches to adopting them.
For instance, Hilton now provides gadgets in hotel rooms for connecting Apple devices and media hubs that can be used to connect the laptop to the TV and IP-based phones from Cisco. Yet it is still not where it envisions itself to be: Thomson believes that the hotel is not yet ready to deploy touchscreen-based in-room devices that replace telephones.
“Given the variety of clients we see, the uptake can be varied. Also, as much as we make the device flexible, guest requirements cannot be pre-determined each time. It is going to be some time before the telephone gets entirely replaced,” he says.
And then, there is a culture twist to hospitality in India. According to Goyal, “The culture is our region is still more people-centric; so we don’t see people turning to mobile devices readily for getting information about the services that a hotel has offer. A few boutique hotels have taken such initiatives but it will take a few years until the world becomes more mobile application-centric. Interactions in Indian hospitality sector today are still preferred to be people-based rather than device-based, particularly on the customer side.”
Though many of the five-star hotels have started exploring these technologies, most budget hotels are still holding back due to financial constraints. Adopting these tools as a cloud or a managed service is something that could definitely make the journey a bit easier for them. Says Bhatnagar of AGC Networks, “Hotels need not invest in a lot of infrastructure. They can use these tools on a hosted model, in which a cloud service provider can host the PBX and the communication tools at his end and provide the connectivity and the devices on a per-room, per-month basis.”
As of now, much of the adoption is happening in pockets wherein organisations are experimenting with these tools to see how they can add value to their business. It would be some time before we see a lot of tablet-wielding waiters bent over dinner tables or front office staff checking in guests with their smartphones. But that’s the way the industry is set to move.