Case study: Hotel group improves contact centre

The Edwardian Group London has refreshed its customer contact centre with an updated communications platform.

The hotel group approached Aspect and Dell to explore the feasibility of implementing Microsoft Lync to help improve communication channels between staff and with guests to enhance the customer experience. The initial requirements then expanded to incorporate the development of a new customer contact centre to broaden the communication platforms through which guests are able to contact hotel staff, as well as helping the hotel to better manage its staffing levels and associated costs.

The Edwardian Group London welcomes over 1.2 million guests every year. Through introducing a new customer contact centre, the hotel group is now able to offer guests the ability to contact staff on a range of platforms and improve their overall experience, from the initial booking through to their stay at the hotel. They also now have the ability to better execute the distribution of their workforce with the goal to reduce costs associated with managing constantly shifting staff levels.

To achieve these goals, it was necessary for The Edwardian Group London to evolve its existing customer contact centre from a voice-only system reliant on phone-based communication to a more progressive and scalable solution. A new infrastructure was needed to enable guests to contact the hotel group on a variety of different platforms, including email, instant messaging (IM) and social networking, as well as to improve communication between staff. To deliver this multi-platform technology, the existing Alcatel PBX (private branch exchange) telephone system needed to be updated.

To ensure that the new infrastructure would support full-service, innovative communications that benefited both guests and staff, the project was broken down into three specific areas:

• The integration of Microsoft Lync with the existing Alcatel telephone system to improve communication channels between staff across all 14 hotels in the UK.
• An updated customer contact centre based on Aspect’s Unified IP 7.1 for 150 agents to replace the existing contact centre technology. The new software simplifies and streamlines agent administration to provide the right staff support at any given time from any hotel. It also manages potential overflow to home workers at peak times and enables the reservations team to obtain customer contact information through a wider variety of methods, including instant messaging, email, SMS, social networks and mobile applications.
• The ability to forecast resource requirements with Aspect Workforce Management for 200 people to deliver seamless enterprise engagement. This improves employee productivity and staff deployment efficiency leading ultimately to improved call-waiting times, service levels and customer satisfaction.

“Our communications platform is critical to the high level of service that we offer our guests by widening the means by which they can reach our staff; whether that is to make a reservation or order room service,” said Iype Abraham, Commercial Development Director at The Edwardian Group London. “The new solution helps us predict staff levels and improve our understanding of the costs of managing a large, fluid workforce. We can easily scale the system to meet our requirements, which is important in supporting our business growth.”

“The deployment of Aspect’s integrated Unified and Workforce platforms gives The Edwardian Group London a strategic technology investment that provides them flexibility for future growth, something that their old PBX was unable to provide,” said Mark King, Senior Vice President, Europe and Africa at Aspect. “Our ability to integrate multiple legacy processes and systems not only creates a competitive differentiator for The Edwardian Group London, it will also help them in their goal to deliver consistently exceptional guest experiences.”