Guest Experience solutions for the hospitality industry
Your hospitality business thrives when your people can make personal contact with each customer and appear to do it with ease. By better connecting your people to the information and systems they need, Microsoft and its partners can help your organization achieve a competitive advantage through enhanced guest experience, improved employee productivity, and more efficient operations. Your people will be able to access the right information at the right time using familiar, easy-to-use software that provides innovative, real-time visibility and customized analysis of data. Microsoft Guest Experience solutions can also enhance collaboration between headquarters, stores, and suppliers, and improve customer service and overall sales performance.
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Business challenge
The customer-focused hospitality services industry is a highly competitive environment. The experience that you and your people provide guests must enable you—as well as your employees—to deepen your relationship with them. Your people need the right tools to do this efficiently and successfully at the ground level. Challenges in the business include:
| • | Communication: Person-to-person communication between your people is crucial in your data-intensive, real-time, often geographically dispersed organization. Older communication and collaboration tools can be awkward and inefficient to use, and the problem is exacerbated by high employee turnover. |
| • | Purchasing systems: Your people need to know not only which materials to order when and how much to order, but also how to do it efficiently and in a cost-effective manner. |
| • | Room and sales personnel availability: With ever-changing availability of rooms, staff, and services, creating efficient schedules and running catering events can be an overwhelming process. A chaotic work load can leave little time for determining how to increase your people's productivity or profitability. |
Solutions
Innovative solutions from Microsoft and its large ecosystem of partners can help your people provide a superior guest experience. These solutions feature familiar, easy-to-use tools on the front end, so your people can get up to speed easily—without a steep learning curve—to help improve business performance and the bottom line:
| • | Collaboration
These solutions include systems for integrated communication and collaboration through access to team Web sites and roles-based portals. Your site can be scaled and personalized specifically to fit your people's needs, using features such as personalized notifications and intuitive forms. |
| • | Integrated purchasing
With consolidated purchasing information and a single view of your inventory, it's easier to compare vendors and manage contract pricing maintenance. Your people can also view historical information for the tracking and future planning of seasonal and special events. Microsoft purchasing solutions enable your people to provide your properties with the right goods and materials at the right time. |
| • | Sales and catering
Microsoft integrated sales and catering solutions can help your people closely track room availability and monitor salesperson productivity, while maximizing profitability using flexible rates and fees. Your managers will be able to communicate and coordinate activities more effectively throughout your properties through improved visibility provided by centralized event orders. Integration of point-of-sale and accounting systems helps simplify your billing and makes it easy to maintain guest histories for analysis and ranking. |
| • | Customer relationship management (CRM): Microsoft partners have developed a number of leading CRM solutions based on the latest generation of Microsoft technology. Using the Microsoft suite of applications, devices, and technology, Microsoft partners can provide you with CRM solutions that personalize the guest experience and help you generate more revenue. |
| • | In-room entertainment systems: In-room entertainment is one of the fastest growing revenue-generating opportunities in hospitality with guests showing a greater willingness to pay for movies, in-room games, and high-speed Internet access. |
| • | Self-service technology: Self-service technology is giving experienced business travelers the efficiency they demand—such as automated check-out options—while freeing up hotel employees to help the casual traveler. |
Case studies
7-Eleven
After a detailed analysis of costs and business continuity factors, 7-Eleven chose to upgrade its retail information system to Microsoft Windows Server system instead of Linux and to deploy in-store servers based on the Intel Xeon processor. In addition to a 20-percent decrease in total cost of ownership, new capabilities can now be enabled on the system 50 percent more quickly than on the previous system.
Virgin Entertainment Group
To share more accurate and timely information throughout its organization, Virgin Entertainment chose Microsoft SharePoint portal technology, implemented by Microsoft partner Xavor. Virgin Entertainment's 1,500 employees now get daily information for more efficient collaboration, resulting in 20 percent more time for managers to spend on the sales floor, and 15 percent more time freed for higher-value managerial tasks. Additionally, IT support costs are down by more than 15 percent from the previous system.
Hilton Hotels
Hilton Hotels needed a forecasting system to improve its business analysis process. Its previous OnQ Forecast Management System was built using Microsoft SQL Server 2000, so to include additional features and criteria, they expanded it through a solution based on the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 using the Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 development system. Data processing is now three times faster, and catering forecast systems work 25 percent faster, along with increased request capabilities.
Outrigger Hotels & Resorts
Agents at Outrigger & OHANA Hotels and Resorts handled thousands of daily reservations through multiple systems, such as phone calls, faxes, e-mail messages, and Internet chats. The company decided to deploy a new and hosted On-Demand call center infrastructure, built on the Microsoft .NET Framework from Microsoft Partner Echopass, to integrate all incoming guest contacts into a single solution. So far, the new system has helped Outrigger increase their people's operational workflow and efficiency, improve agent productivity, and save $100,000 in operating costs.
Business benefits
By implementing innovative Guest Experience solutions from Microsoft and its large ecosystem of partners, you and your people can experience the following benefits:
| • | Integrated communications and collaboration
Microsoft Instant Messenger, e-mail, Web conferencing, and telephony applications can be used to integrate legacy systems, enabling your people to work more efficiently to increase revenue and guest satisfaction. They'll get timely access to information and enhanced process control through personalized notifications and intuitive forms. Your people will also be able to easily collaborate through a variety of familiar, easy-to-use interfaces, while you can use communication tools to get a high-level view of market conditions and adjust your rates accordingly, and take full advantage of enterprise buying power to secure better terms and prices from suppliers. |
| • | Access to information and people
Team sites, store workbenches, and roles-based portals provide a single, integrated environment where information can be centrally controlled, deployed, and managed with greater ease and agility. Your people can delight guests by providing quicker response times to queries and requests, and share customer information between multiple properties to help drive sales. |
| • | People-driven processes
Because your site can be scaled and personalized to fit your organization, it becomes easier for your people to find contacts and data. Your people will be able to find the information they need when they need it, to help improve company productivity and to better serve guests. They can also improve inventory management and reduce waste through the enhanced monitoring of supply levels. |
Overview
Technologies
