Unified
Communications has been helping organizations across industries meet challenges
in this demanding economic climate. By combining all communication channels
into a single, manageable interface, UC simplifies the way information is
shared and improves collaboration both within the organization across verticals
and with guests or customers, partners and suppliers.
There has
been a massive evolution and adaptability of unified communications in
Hospitality segment of late. The economy that follows UC deployment is
considerably attractive and this is also a key motivation for more and more
Hotels and businesses pertaining to Travel and Hospitality considering this
latest communications technology today.
The same
is well evident from a rapidly growing market size of unified communications.
On specific ROTI analyses, significantly quantifiable paybacks (200% or more)
could be expected over a period of 9 to 12 months by means of enhanced user
productivity, consolidated and softened communications infrastructure,
reduced out-of-pocket expenses such as carrier or traveling costs.
In Travel & Hospitality UC
brings brilliant opportunities to enhance communications, reduce ‘human latency’
and enrich the overall guest experience. With UC, hotel management can get
secure and unremitting access to the guest information and similar resources
while the clients get ubiquitous access to uninterrupted service.
Service is a premium in the hospitality
industry and a successful UC integration could just guarantee that. An
intelligent, integrated CRM business communication solution can optimize
workflow to ensure customers receive the highest levels of customer care or
support. Hotels can maximize their service levels and minimize the
communication costs, both at the same time.
These days, Contact Centers play
imperative role in Travel and Hospitality industry. Hoteliers need Contact Center solutions that are designed to
help their business retain, grow, and increase customer loyalty maintaining the
high-standards of service.
Since customers evaluate the quality
of service on their total experience – that’s the sum total of impressions made
throughout the relationship, across multiple channels, over time. That’s why
it’s important to have a call center management solution in place that
integrates easily, is user-friendly, allows for performance monitoring
and maximizes your investment in people and technology.
Fortunately,
hoteliers have a whole range of solutions to choose from based on their
specific requirements and specific business objectives. A growing hotel chain
that prefers a cost-effective solution which fits into its existing
infrastructure and offers high levels of flexibility in terms of upgrade and
compatibility, can consider solutions like OpenScape Contact Center
Enterprise.
Such
open-standards based solutions fit easily into the existing IT-infra and are
multi-site, multi-channel skills based routing and reporting engines that enable
inbound voice, email, web chat, FAX, voicemail, and callbacks for medium to
large Contact Centers. Such solutions benefit by driving first contact
resolution, optimizing Contact
Center resources,
enhancing customer service delivery, adapting easily to meet customer needs and
simplifying implementation & operation.
Similarly,
for small to medium Contact Centers there are comparable single-site engines.
Hoteliers can become even better connected by harnessing the power of social
media within their UC strategies. Socially-aware Unified Communications is
all about leveraging the breadth and reach of social media as part of any
organization’s UC strategy. Tier-I solution providers offer flexible Media
Integration capabilities which can be customized as required by specific
business objectives and communication needs.
Such
integrations allow Hotels and other businesses to tightly weave both public and
corporate social media tools into their enterprise customer contact centers and
UC solutions. Some social media integration solutions for Contact Centers can
incorporate real time information from SM engines like Twitter to help agents
deliver better service or sell more products.
By
integrating such applications with social media, Contact Center
staff can leverage Twitter or other micro-blogs such as LinkedIn as another
medium integrated into their UC experience within a common unified desktop,
just like voice, IM, and video. They can send general tweets from the top of
their UC client and direct tweets to their contacts from the twitter icon next
to their name.
And,
through UC desktop integration, sharing of persistent and real-time social
media via blogs, corporate wikis and content-persistent chat groups can improve
cycle time of team collaboration by integration of user presence within media
streams. This could be taken a step further by enabling the staff users to
automate their UC presence status updates based upon on the context of their
tweets.
For
example, the application can monitor their twitter stream, pick up on the
context of their tweet (e.g. I am meeting with a client now”), and use that to
change their presence status (e.g. to in a meeting”) and their preferred
device (to mobile”). An application like this can even automate routine tasks
based on the context of tweets – it can set up and launch a conference call
based on the context of an employee’s tweets.
By Asheesh Pandia, Siemens
