The Role Of Unified Communications In Hospitality
It’s no secret the hospitality landscape is changing.
Even before the pandemic turned much of the travel and hotel industries on their heads, companies were growing increasingly digital. With advances in technology happening at a breakneck speed, hospitality companies have been investing more in the cloud, apps, and innovation.
Unified Communications plays a valuable role in this transition to a new hospitality age.
With UCaaS (Unified Communication as a Service) solutions, hospitality companies can unify their communication systems, connect with clients through new channels, and even reduce costs.
Now the hospitality sector is struggling more than usual following the pandemic, UC could have a bigger role to play in its future.
The Rising Demand for UC in Hospitality
UCaaS has already delivered some major changes in industries like retail, healthcare, and banking. In the retail landscape, UCaaS allows for faster transactions, and faster interactions with customers. In healthcare, UCaaS keeps professionals connected in a chaotic landscape, improves collaboration, and saves lives. Now, hospitality is also tapping into the benefits UC can offer.
With fewer people travelling and taking advantage of the hospitality sector after COVID, the industry is under pressure to drive bigger outcomes from lower budgets. Customers need faster, more efficient service to even consider interacting with some hospitality brands. As we move towards a future of more streamlined, effective travel experience, here are some of the ways UC can make an impact.
Better Deployment and Management
In the UCaaS environment, traditional location-based telephony can be replaced by simpler, cloud-based solutions. Rather than having one or two people handle a range of calls in one front-desk environment, hospitality companies can allow multiple employees to access soft-phones through their smartphones, tablets, and laptops wherever they are. This makes it easier to manage customer queries, and deal with requests at speed.
Business leaders can create automated routing systems that send calls through to mobile agents when a front-desk professional isn’t available. At the same time, because the technology comes through the cloud, (and can be managed digitally too), there will be fewer installation headaches to worry about. Provisioning and maintaining technology can be a much less painful and expensive experience.
Improved Collaboration
Most of the hospitality companies struggling to stay ahead in the landscape today are reliant on teamwork. Everyone, from managers at the back of a hotel to front-end receptionists and customer service experts need to be connected to deliver the right results. A strong UCaaS solution often comes with tools to enable better collaboration between team members, wherever they are.
Contact centre agents working remotely can provide people in the hotel or hospitality environment with information on an upcoming stay. Everyone can share the same information from CRM tools and service tickets about customer experience and preferences. When all of your employees are working together on the same page, wherever they are, this makes the workplace more effective.
Better Customer Experience
Hospitality brands deal with a huge number of customer queries and concerns every day. In this demanding environment, it’s crucial to have the right communication strategy in place. A UCaaS environment will allow hospitality leaders to keep track of employees and customers across multiple channels, managing everything from instant chat environments to calls in one place.
A UCaaS solution might also include support for mobile devices, so employees who aren’t behind a desk can still keep an eye on customer needs and guest expectations. Workers can even quickly relay emergency requests and announcements to other staff members, like engineers who need to fix a problem in a hotel room or professionals who need to see to gym equipment. Every second saved with better communication contributes to stronger customer experiences.
Improved Workplace Productivity
Unified Communications, and access to multiple useful devices in the hospitality environment drives stronger results from a productivity perspective too. Employees can check guests in tablets, and even provide mobile tablets where customers can make requests and send their questions through to a shared service tracking system.
UCaaS can also include empowering employees with access to further sources of information. An integrated CRM solution makes it easier to keep an eye on customer sentiment levels. Companies can use the information they gather to learn more about their target audience and implement changes that turn a simple trip to the spa into a more memorable experience. An aligned back-end environment also saves employees significant time on creating great experience, because they don’t have to jump between multiple apps to get things done.
Better Business Management
An aligned communication environment isn’t just a great thing for the employees in the hospitality world; it can also be vital for business leaders, and IT administrators too. IT team leaders don’t have to work as hard to track all of the potential privacy and security problems in a hospitality communication system if they can track multiple environments in the same location. Cloud solutions may even come with access to automation and AI tools which can enhance the management of the business even further.
Multinational hospitality businesses can even scale their communication system as their operation grows. There’s plenty of scope for bringing in more back-end professionals, remote workers, and even other hotel or hospitality business locations. Because the aligned environment will provide insights into the full customer journey and business processes, it will also be easier for business leaders to make decisions they know will benefit the bottom line.
UCaaS Powers the Future of Hospitality
UCaaS is one of the most valuable tools any hospitality company can consider in the new age of digital transformation. With Unified Communication tools, hospitality brands can make sure they’re equipped to handle a growing variety of customer demands, in a changing landscape.
By investing in the correct UCaaS system, companies can learn more about their target audience through aligned communication services. At the same time, UCaaS opens the door to higher levels of productivity, better efficiency, and improved teamwork, all at a much lower price compared to standard communication strategies.