Guoman Case Study
Daisy helps prestigious hotel group enhance customer experience with inbound call management system.
IT Management in the Fast Lane, Where poor communications means poor profits.
Few businesses are as competitive as hotel management. There is seldom a moment when a hotel is not under siege from demanding, visitors each with their own priorities; holiday makers, desperate for bookings during the short seasonal windows; company purchasing departments, aggressive in their demands for lowest prices; conference organisers demanding the highest standards of service.
Overlay this with the added pressures of an economic recession and you have an environment where customer satisfaction becomes a priority transcending all others.
The consequences for hotel telecommunications are predictable. Prolonged queuing is not tolerated by customers who know there are other hotels waiting to take their calls. Ultimately, a lost call is a lost reservation and another blow to the bottom line.
In hotel management, more than any other business, the quality of call management has a direct impact on market share and business profitability. This was the environment awaiting Paul Hope when assigned the role of IT Manager for Guoman Hotel.
Management (UK) Limited, the group comprising the national network of Thistle and Guoman Hotels, including household names such as The Grosvenor, The Tower, The Marble Arch and so on. With a total of some 38 large, prestigious, busy hotels within the group as a whole, the IT management role must rank as one of the most demanding in the UK hospitality sector.
On-line, Inbound Management
Zero capital expenditure for a zero growth economy Not deterred by such responsibility, Paul set about item one on his ‘to do’ list – to set up an effective inbound call management system. With some half million incoming calls per month, arriving via the BT network, the group was not maximising revenues from non-geographic numbers and lacked the capability to manage incoming calls effectively.
The answer arrived in the form of a web-based Inbound Management Service, managed by telecoms specialists Daisy Group plc. It took only 4 weeks to fully deploy the on-line system, provide revenue-generating non-geographic numbers, and set up other 08XX numbers used by the Group in its customer relationship management activities.
Above all, though, it was the capabilities of the platform’s extraordinary range of features that were to transform the way the Group handled incoming calls and improve customer experience, all done with the zero capex, zero maintenance benefits of a web-based service.
“Your call may be recorded...” But how quickly can it be retrieved?
First amongst those capabilities to make an impact was call recording.
With a requirement for raising quality of service delivery and monitoring the handling of advertising response, the Group’s marketing team needed simple and immediate access to recorded calls in order to analyse performance and take appropriate action as quickly as possible. Previously, the group had considered a traditional hardware solution using NICE recording and monitoring. Faced with a £60k bill and subsequent maintenance costs, Paul turned to the on-line option provided by the inbound management platform. The system offers a call recording function that delivers the unique capability to download call recordings in bulk, in real time with a storage capacity of up to 28 days.
And intuitive customer portal gives the marketing and IT departments direct access to recording controls. Now, service quality can be monitored in real time and without the capital investment or maintenance costs involved with hardware. The ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of Inbound Call Management Multi-function, minimal admin control With the success of the call recording solution, Paul was quick to identify and implement a series of other features that brought value to business productivity whilst keeping admin to a minimum:
Business Continuity
Many of the businesses that experienced the exceptional snow falls of early 2009 will remember the disruption caused and may even continue to carry the legacy of damaged business and customer loss.
Not so for Guoman Hotels.
When staff could not get into work at the Tower Thistle Hotel, the inbound call platform was activated to divert calls to head office call centre at heathrow. Call redirection was seamless, business continued uninterrupted and customers were happy.
Reporting on Lost Calls
The best customer service is learnt from experience. With the ability of the inbound platform to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful calls, such as engaged, Guoman management are now equipped with the data to understand the reasons for lost calls. Data is uploaded by FTP to a site where reports are generated, then distributed to management.
Call Queuing
Nobody likes to be held in a queue. Now the inbound platform helps Guoman enhance their previously basic system from an ordeal for the caller into a shortened and better-informed experience. Streaming adverts, music on hold and announcements on position in queue, all generated by the inbound platform, help the caller to prolong their period of waiting and increase the probability of a successful reservation.
Importantly, the platform also generates real-time queuing statistics, such as average queuing time, that help management to optimise the waiting experience.
SMS Messaging For Missed Calls With the deployment of IVR and call queuing, missed calls within the Guoman Group have improved from around 8,000 per day to 2000 per month. From the customer’s point of view, though, that is still 2000 per month too many.
As we all know, service problems are annoying, but a prompt and effective resolution of the problem can impress. With this in mind, Paul enabled a simple configuration of the platform to send an SMS message to callers who have hung up or have been disconnected from the call. The SMS conveys a message providing a hotline number that can be called for a guaranteed response. The number connects to a call centre operator who will always give priority attention to calls on that number.
Fax to Email
The hotel industry is one of those where faxes still play an important role, particularly when it involves booking confirmations through agents. For the Guoman Group, the number of faxes per month can reach twenty to thirty thousand. Traditional fax machines have their problems, though – hardware failures, maintenance costs and the ecological negatives associated with paper consumption.
With the inbound platform Paul has enabled a fax to email feature that receives customer faxes via an 0871 number (generating a revenue for Guoman), converting the documents to email then sending them to the respective hotels as emails. Responses are converted back to fax and returned to the sender as a fax. All without coming into contact with paper.
The Future
Ask Paul Hope if he has exhausted the capabilities of the inbound platform and you may be surprised:
“Far from it. The platform still presents vast opportunities for improving business productivity and managing non geographic numbers. With the regular changes that occur with NGN’s the platform also helps us keep up to date.”
“With increasing Group interest abroad, one of our challenges will be to offer the benefits of non geographic numbers to callers from overseas. This opens up a whole new range of customer requirements, such as multi language assistance, that the inbound platform will help us develop.”
“We’ve achieved an enormous amount over the past twelve months and the team at Daisy has played a big part in that. I strongly recommend the inbound platform to any customer- focused business, but it’s an ‘expertled’ deployment and, for us Daisy will continue to be invaluable in that process. You need experience and, with Daisy, it doesn’t get any better.”
Guoman Hotels and Thistle Hotels are part of Guoman Hotel Management (UK) Ltd, a group of 38 hotels located throughout the UK. For more information see www.guoman.com
