The Paradox of Empowering Digital Communications to Improve Guest Satisfaction

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Request management technology brings together digital channels in one system. It also integrates them into the typical workflows of your hotel staff. Without it, additional communication options for guests only complicate the lives of staff.

Spreading guest requests across various unmanaged channels puts operations in a non-deterministic state. It is nearly impossible to guarantee a stable service. Requests can be dropped, accountability can be bypassed, and ultimately service will suffer. There is no real trace of guest involvement. It is nearly impossible to guarantee that everything will get done.

ALICE's Shashou says it's a missed opportunity. Hotels spend a lot of energy pre-booking a guest, tracking reviews and billing. "But the reality is that the time you spend as a guest at a hotel, from booking to checkout, is a black box because it lives in so many different places. It lives in the heads of some employees, in different systems, on paper and on the radio."

Your staff could use technology to spend more time delighting what is a loan guests. Instead, your hotel staff must now spend their time tracking all of these different channels. Then they must sort and manually send these requests to the appropriate staff. There’s an irony here. Increasing the communication options for your guests can increase their satisfaction. But when your staff can’t keep up with these channels, service suffers. Guest satisfaction is compromised again.

Indeed, every additional touchpoint introduces the potential for guest dissatisfaction. “Hotels see the ROI of providing an authentic experience,” explains Shukla . “Experience and authenticity come from consistent, end-to-end service. It doesn’t matter if I have a good check-in experience. If there’s something wrong with the room service, I’ll write about my bad experience. If I have a hotel with a great ambiance, but they can’t handle my airport pickup, I’ll write about it. It all comes down to the weakest link phenomenon.”

"Guests view their hotel as a whole. They expect to request services from any department they choose. And for hotels to share those requests across the property," says ALICE's Shashou.

Solution: Dedicated Guest Request Management Technology
Fortunately, modern technology can make managing guest requests much easier. Dedicated guest request management software can centralize all digital and analog requests. And mobile software tools allow hotel staff to enter requests made by guests in person or over the phone. The software can then seamlessly send these requests to the appropriate departments and individuals. Staff can then accept these requests in the form of tickets and close them once completed. This ensures accountability and transparency in the handling of all requests. It also provides a de facto workflow tool or to-do list. This kind of transparency is not provided by typical analog tools such as pen, paper, and radio.

Dedicated request management technology can relieve hotel staff from hours of “detective work.” A digital paper trail frees reception, engineering, and management teams from having to search for the cause of a problem, the context of a service request, or the source of a guest complaint.

With the right request management system, your staff will never miss or drop another request. And that's no matter what crazy communications the hotel industry comes up with next (here's looking at you room service emojis and voice-activated hotel numbers ).