Luxury hotel chain

Design of technology, people and location changes to enable a superb customer experience to be delivered at reduced cost

An operator of a small number of hotels serving celebrities and ultra-high nett worth individuals wanted to deliver customer experience and cost benefits by migrating to a consolidated reservations and relationship management centre

We provided a contact centre expert and a digital customer experience expert, supported by an analyst to perform an As Is assessment of the existing operations. The team visited centres in London, Los Angeles, Paris and Milan to assess the current operations, and used data requests and telephone interviews to assess the three remaining centres. In each centre we interviewed management and staff to understand their requirements and how well (or not) were met by existing systems. We observed front line staff and listened to how they handled calls to inform further our assessment of the support of agents in pursuit of an excellent customer experience. We then compared what we had found with contact centre best practices across technology and operating model.

This process delivered compelling evidence for to support a case for change – for example specific incidences of customer experience failures that could have been controlled by better technology and a more disciplined operation and data that showed unit costs were much higher than benchmarks

Upon feeding back our findings to the CEO and his key team, we were commissioned to design a new consolidated operating model. This design covered the technology, operating locations, governance and roadmap required to support individual hotel needs from a common shared service. We supported management through the series of critical strategic decisions required and built the business case for the investment required.

  • Our proposal delivered a cost reduction of c. 25% by unlocking economies of scales and more rigorous application of contact centre disciplines such as resource management and demand forecasting.
  • They also improved customer experience by enabling our client to measure it for the first time and put in place suitable performance measures and incentives