Ayava helps its hospitality customers to improve their hotel’s performance and enhance guest experience through integrated communications and networking solutions By Sudipta Dev
Avaya a global leader in business collaboration and communication solutions offers many important solutions for the hospitality industry. These include scalable and reliable communications platforms such as Avaya IP Office and Avaya Aura. There is also Avaya Hospitality Messaging Server 400 for guest voicemail. All these integrate with a hotel’s property management system (PMS). Avaya Mobility solution provides mobile connections free to the hotel staff to respond to guests more efficiently, while hospitality smartphone-based apps such as Avaya Guest Assist helps them to improve guest satisfaction. The multichannel contact centres caters to unique guest needs with experience portals. Solutions include Avaya Contact Center, Proactive Outreach Manager and Social Media Manager. “The hospitality sector in India is growing tremendously. In this growth period, hoteliers are increasingly looking for new ways to deliver an exceptional guest experience. Avaya solutions are helping hotels to create a cost-effective, personalised guest experience through integrated communications solutions. From the first contact with guests whether by phone or at check-in until they depart, there are countless opportunities to win their loyalty and wallet share,” says Arun Shetty, director of collaboration solutions – India, Avaya.
Avaya’s integrated hospitality solutions offers capabilities such as customer experience management solutions for service agents, collaboration solutions for executives and staff, voice mail, messaging for mobile staff, guest assist app to provide that personal experience, networking for Wi-Fi , task management and mobile solutions and the basic communications needs for receptionists and guests. “In addition to that, Avaya’s solutions also help hotels to deliver a connected guest experience based on a common Avaya communications platform to deliver all of the services with every interaction with the guests,” adds Shetty.
The company has a vast experience of working with customers and partners in the hospitality sector across the world. “At Avaya our focus is to help our customers to improve their hotel performance and enhance their guest’s experience through our integrated communications and networking solutions. In addition to that, we help them increase revenues by providing more attentive, and expedient customer service, improve staff efficiency, provide with wide variety of options for new hotel services and enable the guests to access hotel services and amenities more easily. With seamless features like simple and scalable networking platform that reduces cost and enables flawless communications with the help of internet connections, Wi-Fi and video surveillance,” states Shetty, pointing out that, Avaya aims at developing solutions that are able to improve staff collaboration capabilities and add multimedia collaboration services to conference centres with Avaya Scopia Video.
Streamlining processes
These solutions help in streamlining processes and improving operational efficiency. “We at Avaya believe that converged networks, consolidating systems massively contribute in gaining faster networks and performance will help in increasing operational efficiencies,” says Shetty, pointing out that looking at things from the customer-facing staff’s perspective, the lobby staff and front desk agents are usually the first employees to interact with guests in person. Their goal is to check in guests quickly and easily with a personal touch, and to deliver great service. They may also need to reach property staff, as well as outside resources (like restaurants and local attractions) quickly to accommodate the special requests from guests. For all this they need a communications system that is seamlessly integrated with existing system of the hotel. Here is when our seamless integration of communication solutions comes into play providing property applications, along with mobility solutions to keep the front desk staff in constant touch with all other areas of the property. “The main agenda for a concierge is to handle guests’ questions and requests quickly and efficiently and provide personal service. In addition to that managing these tasks and requests with a mobile applications, could help increase guest satisfaction as well as productivity and performance. There is a huge requirement for the hotel staff to be reachable at any point of time and from any place in order to respond to the requests and complete tasks quickly and efficiently. Avaya offers a variety of solutions to meet their needs for mobility, so they can increase both guest satisfaction and their own productivity and performance,” explains Shetty. Then there are the customer service agents in the contact centre who may not meet guests in person, but they are usually the first ones to interact with guests during trip planning, etc. They continue the conversation throughout the trip through social media with a sole objective of delivering a personalised experience to their guests. “They also need to connect with guests on the web through emails and instant messaging, and be able to reach out proactively to guests. We believe that the guests rely on IT staff for flawless Wi-Fi connections on their mobile devices from anywhere in the hotel premises. At Avaya we deliver a personalised guest experience and increase service revenues through; increased occupancy rates, customer loyalty, and creating memorable experiences, positive reviews via social media, ad sales, increased in-room phone usage charges, delivering real-time promotions and increased sales of fee-based amenities, such as room service,” mentions Shetty.
Communications costs are reduced with converged communications (voice, data), infrastructure consolidation and virtualised networking solutions (more performance, less administration, less hardware). “The costs can also be reduced by improving staff efficiencies with the help of real-time communications and task management and creating staff mobility,” adds Shetty. Today guests expect free Wi-Fi across hotel categories so they can access the Internet 24/7 for email, entertainment, and services – on their own devices, they expect personal service and fast, effective responses to their requests and problems. “In addition to that they expect a high level of convenience, with the ability to get what they need and even conduct business easily right on the property and also demand to use their personal mobile devices to make phone calls and arrange activities without using the in-room phone. The hoteliers recognise that they must deliver a connected guest experience and stay connected with guests through the different stages of the guest cycle,” states Shetty.
How it works
Avaya solutions enable the hotels to offer various platforms for communicating with their customers via text chat, email or link to make a direct call to a hotel agent. “With our solutions the reservation agents will be able to interact with the customers through web chat, IM, email, or phone. This will further help the hotels to create a better engaging relationship with customers and also eliminate the involvement of third party i.e. various travel websites,” says Shetty. The solutions offer unique features like identifying the guests arrival date and help the hotel staff to proactively reach out to their most valued customers and provide them with key updates on things like weather, sightseeing near the hotel, dinner reservations, etc.
“Another feature is asking for their reservation requirements in any restaurant that they may have visited in the past. This is how we create a personal control centre for the guest’s where they can access to a virtual concierge, to order food, to get a wakeup call, check on local events and attractions and book appoints and golf tee times etc,” says Shetty, adding that the guest will be able to utilise 24-hour concierge level service at the touch of a button.
As the number of applications continue to grow, the communication platform is the most strategic part of a property’s technology environment. “Avaya’s solutions deliver an integrated solution that fits into the property environment and helps hoteliers to provide a consistent set of capabilities to meet the needs of their guests and business strategy,” states Shetty.