Hotels Tap Total Connect Now to Deliver Great Experiences and Improve Operational Efficiency

With more competition from challengers like Airbnb and VRBO, and rising expectations from consumers, especially Millennials who live digitally and contextually, the hospitality industry, is responding with innovations that make the guest experience more convenient and enjoyable, while also exploring ancillary revenue opportunities.  

According to IDG, 62 percent of businesses believe digital transformation success is defined by excellent customer experience as measured by customer satisfaction scores, and there are few industries where this is more important than in the hospitality realm, where guest satisfaction is becoming more personalized and paramount particularly when it comes to loyalty programs as well as customer ratings – good and bad.

How can hotels afford to replace legacy real-time communications systems to live up to new expectations, including mobile experiences for booking, checking in, enjoying in-room amenities, and exploring neighborhoods, given the importance of running profitable businesses in this exciting but competitive industry?

Ray Pasquale, Founder and CEO of Unified Office believes he has found a way, and at ITEXPO in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, announced a new offering for hotels that they developed, tested, and implemented at the exclusive Albion Hotel Miami Beach, a Rubell Family property.

“Unified Office has provided us with a reliable, high quality, business class, voice communications service that is simple, elegant, and easy-to-use with applications such as, real-time performance analytics, the latest in call choreography, and automated notifications for reservations and scheduling, all woven right in to improve the effectiveness of our business operations,” said Maximo Soncini, Revenue Manager, The Albion Hotel Miami Beach, a Rubell Family property. “They took our hotel from an outdated system that was very inflexible and delivered 21st-century capabilities, enabling us to operate more efficiently and provide a higher level of customer service to our guests.”

Unified Office offers reliable hybrid cloud-based virtual communications services, business analytics, and other innovative features. Their Total Connect Now offering will integrate with leading hotel management and messaging services such as Opera, Synergy, and Kipsu to provide full customer visits, bookings, and preference details with each incoming call along with other productivity tools.

As a part of this offering, Unified Office has also created an in-room portal for guests to be referred to local vendor and service providers, such as restaurants and tourist venues. In-room concierge features, including self-ordering functions for room service and housekeeping and other services, are also fully integrated into the in-room portal to increase staff effectiveness and guest experience. Hotel rooms can once again serve as meaningful profit centers, along with improving the overall guest experience.

“Hotel operators are experiencing very rapid and dynamic changes in their business,” said Ray Pasquale, Founder & CEO of Unified Office. “It has been some time since hotels have been able to monetize services in their rooms beyond ordering from the hotel restaurant, video on demand, and concierge services.”

Employees can answer and transfer calls from any device, from any location. They can also easily change their messages on hold, and their voicemail and text messages, and add customized call flows dynamically whenever they choose. Hotel managers can use Unified Office’s analytics for an at-a-glance view of customer service responsiveness in real-time for pending guest requests for housekeeping, front desk, room service, and other guest service offerings.

 “Hotel operators are experiencing very rapid and dynamic changes in their business,” said Pasquale continued. “We designed this service in response to our hotel customers’ expressed needs to first improve their communications services and then to help them with their customer service and operational productivity. No longer will their guests have to experience dropped or clipped calls, busy signals, or worst yet being placed on hold or put into voicemail. We are also offering a fully integrated, immersive communications experience for their guests while expanding hotel room revenue generation opportunities. Unified Office is the only company that can deliver this level of innovation to hotel operators of all sizes.”

According to the company, benefits for the hospitality industry include:

• Integration with hotel customer management software such as Opera, Synergy, and Kipsu.
• A centralized operations portal from which to view, configure, and manage communications services remotely, including dialing schemes, messaging, call flows, operations analytics remotely.
• Automated notifications, appointment confirmations, message routing, and scheduling services.
• The ability to customize communications workflows that reflect their business needs.
• Uniformity of services enables their staff to easily bring their offices with them, wherever they happen to be on any given day.
• A hybrid, on-premise, and cloud-based solution that enables the highest quality VoIP offering available with the most reliable and resilient service platform converting calls into dollars.
• Business continuity that eliminates downtime by finding and fixing problems in most cases before the customer becomes aware of them.
• Superior customer service, 24X7, provided by Unified Office.
• Rapid installation of their services without interrupting their business.
• Real-time analytics for customer service training, coaching, and other types of operational performance assessment.
• Cost savings experienced by removing expensive legacy PBXs and by eliminating the need for costly legacy T1 lines and/or MPLS circuits.
• A single end-to-end managed service solution provided by one vendor means one call gets it all done with one partner.

Hotels will need to replace legacy systems soon, as vendors are no longer supporting traditional phone and voice services. The hospitality industry has been a leader in leveraging unified communication technologies to drive an enhanced level of efficiency in their business processes, while in parallel creating innovative and competitive experiences for their guests.