The guest experience is not only about the comfort and services offered by the hotel. It also involves the efficiency and responsiveness of the establishment’s employees.
A decisive factor for hotels today, improving the guest experience requires maximized employee productivity while ensuring their well-being at work.
From the recruitment stage, it is important to ensure that candidates align with the establishment’s culture and values so they can thrive as much as possible. Then, for the manager, it is important to improve their team’s working conditions within the hotel.
How to Reconcile Well-Being and Employee Productivity Through Digital Solutions?
The Guest Experience: A Competitive Challenge
Guests today no longer simply seek a hotel room to rest but a truly differentiating guest experience. We can also note that more and more guests visit hotels to enjoy the establishment’s services. We are entering the era of ultra-personalization.
To respond to this new demand from clientele, hotel employees, regardless of their department, must respond quickly and efficiently to guest requests. In an increasingly competitive context in the hospitality industry, it is essential to work on this guest experience in order to grow satisfaction rates and build guest loyalty. Indeed, innovative hotel concepts are blossoming everywhere and guests are attached to the experience they live. To differentiate yourself, it is therefore wise to adopt a customer loyalty policy, which involves highlighting the services and activities offered by the hotel. But also by having staff capable of responding to all requests efficiently.
Thus, to face these challenges, new management and operational techniques are emerging. At the heart of these improvements, digital is beginning to gain ground. Often described as at odds with human interaction, digital could reveal more advantages than constraints…
Digital at the Center of Productivity
What is important for guests is not the hotel employees’ ability to properly handle hotel formalities, but rather their ability to provide a pleasant welcome and help them as quickly as possible, with the least effort on their part.
The goal of implementing digital solutions is to ultimately optimize guest relationship management. Having receptionists focused on the guest and no longer on tasks with no real added value for the guest. Tasks that take them away from the core of their profession and lead to work overload.
How?
By developing, for example, direct communication channels between guests and employees in a specific hotel department (restaurant, activities, room service, maintenance, etc.). This helps gain speed in executing guest requests while also creating new, more direct connections.
Allowing guests to book autonomously, whether for the restaurant or activities, at any time and from any location. They can do so via a touchscreen tablet or from their smartphone. This significantly improves the guest experience. It also allows employees to focus on what truly matters — responding to guest requests to offer an ultra-personalized stay.
Digital in the Service of People
Typically, digital and technology are described as the opposite of maintaining human relationships. But this assertion is often incorrect.
Indeed, guests are generally in contact, throughout their stay, only with the receptionist. By developing live chat tools, Utelys proposes creating connections between the hotel’s various stakeholders and guests. Ultimately, it is another form of human connection that is created by allowing guests to interact with different employees. Similarly, by developing instant messaging, it allows for more efficient communication and finding personalized answers.
Also, the strength of digitalization is making the services offered by the hotel accessible to all guests. Indeed, guests want to find answers to their questions quickly. It is around this logic that Utelys was developed. Our goal is to offer hoteliers a digital service to distinguish themselves from the competition through a reimagined and unique guest experience.
Ultimately, new technologies appear as tools that can serve to improve productivity. They lighten the workload by allowing employees to refocus on their core mission — the guest. Additionally, these digital tools help strengthen human connections.
