One of our newer hotel clients was seeing an increase in guest complaints due to issues with their guest service management system and were in need of an improved way to manage service requests across their hotels.
The opportunity: in reality, the client wasn't using a comprehensive system to begin with, since they did not have a solution in place for all of their hotels. Each hotel was managing their own requests independently, and there was limited ability to route requests from central call centers over to hotels, or for requests to be easily shared with internal teams or to external service providers.
Our objective was to implement a comprehensive guest service management solution across their portfolio of hotels, to enable more efficient collection, routing, escalation, notification, fulfillment, and reporting of the guest service requests.
The solution: using many out of the box capabilities provided by the Salesforce platform, we were able to design, develop, and deploy an extremely effective guest service management solution to the hotel estate.
The solution allows guests to submit their own service requests using the company's mobile app or their guest service portal (another topic for a future blog post) or by submitting an email to the company's guest service email address (or a single hotel-specific guest service email address in use by some of their hotels). Likewise, if a guest calls the guest service center, an agent can enter a request on behalf of the guest and the request is then routed to the respective hotel and flagged for the appropriate team.
All requests, regardless of how they are received, are routed to the respective hotel and corresponding team so the service request can be fulfilled as quickly as possible.
The solution is flexible enough to allow different teams to be connected to it per hotel, but it also enables certain resources to be connected to more than one hotel if needed - including external service providers, for example.
This type of easy flexibility extends the service management solution outside of our client's hotels, to their external service providers - and ensures that their guests receive the highest level of service regardless of who ultimately is needed to fulfill the individual requests.
The solution also automates notifications and escalations based on business rules defined by our client - which are customizable per hotel and request type. For example, if one hotel wants an open request for extra pillows to be escalated in 15 minutes, but another hotel doesn't want to escalate that same type of request until 30 minutes - the solution is configured accordingly and escalations and corresponding notifications are completed for each hotel as required.
Finally, each hotel can easily report on their service request performance, by date range or request type, etc. and above property leadership can report on service request performance across hotels, using Salesforce's built-in reporting and dashboarding capabilities.
The value delivered: based on the description of the solution (above), the value our client has received is obvious. They were able to quickly deploy a comprehensive service request management solution across their hotel portfolio, to every needed function at each hotel and to several external service providers, enabling them to more effectively collect, route, escalate, notify, fulfill, and report on their entire guest service management function.
If this sounds like a familiar issue for your hotel (or group of hotels), or if it is something you want to discuss in more detail, please CONTACT US - we'd love to craft something similar for your specific needs.
Comments