You and your hotel staff are constantly flooded with information from emails, text messages, walkie-talkies, online meetings, and, of course, telephone calls. But your communication technologies are imperfect, because they exist in silos and are disconnected from core systems and processes. Because of that, your employees may lose key facts, fail to make necessary handoffs, and miss connections and opportunities to provide stellar service.

Learn more: Hospitality resource portal

You need a centralised employee collaboration platform that allows you to capture vital corporate knowledge, share information, and organise conversations into streams across your hotel. By being able to collaborate with core systems such as property management systems (PMS), financial management systems (FMS), and enterprise asset management systems (EAM)—and being able to “follow” people and objects—you’ll solve problems and get work done in ways you never thought possible.

Read more: Why hotel chains are investing in Business Intelligence

Make collaboration the rule—not the exception

Social collaboration in the hospitality industry is part of the growing convergence of business and personal technology.

That said, to make social collaboration work, you need to integrate it across your hotel or hotel group, instead of just tacking it on to your solutions. You also need to streamline and improve business process management, instead of just creating another place where you can store information. And you need to make collaboration easy, efficient, and the rule—not the exception.

Employees across all areas of your hotel must be able to share information—such as VIP check-ins and check-outs, credit alerts, security incidents, and service and maintenance requests—in a centralised location that captures all activity and is easily searchable.

They also must be able to organise conversations into enterprise-wide streams, and to access relevant data that is automatically displayed based on the context of discussions. By sharing key screens, data, and attachments, your employees will be able to work together more effectively.

Read more: Winning the guest in the age of hospitality personalisation

For that to happen, you need advanced social collaboration tools such as:

• Contextual intelligence. On a single screen, get real-time, relevant information from your PMS, EAM, CRM, FMS, human capital management (HCM), and revenue management (RMS) systems. Also get insight from data sources such as your guests’ and meeting planners’ social media feeds.

• Tasks and alerts. Keep up with the progress of important activities by filtering, viewing, and monitoring information. When problems arise, automatically direct alerts and approvals to the appropriate people. While your systems may already handle tasks and alerts internally, they probably don’t cover exceptions that go beyond the purview of one system or department, resulting in incorrect emails, text messages, and handwritten shift log books. With advanced tasks and alerts, you can address issues with hotel guest services as well as unexpected short-term forecast changes, helping you drive urgent promotional activity and staffing adjustments.
• Drill back. Easily see the information that supports the data on your screen. You’ll be able to zero in on issues that matter and keep your operations under control.
• Social objects. Get automatic notices based on parameters that you define so you can “follow” particular social objects and people.

With these tools, you’ll be able to:

• Increase productivity by streamlining communication across systems, shifts, departments, and locations.
• Retain vital corporate knowledge rather than losing it to information silos created by tools such as email, instant messages, and texts.
• Improve guest recognition and service by putting relevant data at employees’ fingertips and making it easy to share knowledge.
• Optimise pricing, staffing, and purchasing decisions by displaying external demand factors and other data that may not yet be reflected across your systems.
• Attract and retain top talent by providing technology that delivers a consumer-inspired experience and creates a work environment in line with increasing employee expectations.
• Gain the security provided by traceable communication.

Read more: How Data Analytics is changing hotel revenue management

Change the way you work

Your employees will be able to work together more easily and make better decisions faster with Infor® Ming.le™, a social workflow tool that marries business information with business processes to make collaboration seamless and assumed.

Employees across all areas of your hotel company can communicate and collaborate, because you can embed key organisational systems—such as PMS, EAM, CRM, RMS, HCM, and FMS—within the Infor Ming.le platform. That means your employees will be able to provide excellent service by managing exceptions and glitches. They’ll also be able to alert each other on the fly about cost-saving and revenue-growing opportunities, reducing reliance on less efficient processes such as email.

For example, if a group cancels at the last minute, your department heads can immediately adjust staff scheduling—and more importantly, focus on replacing the lost business—rather than wait for word to get around through traditional reporting distribution.

Not only will your employees be able to handle a master billing inquiry with the same level of service as spa treatments, they’ll be able to save time by not having to search for the documents, discussions, and details they need most.

Download Infor® Ming.le™ brochure now to find out more about this innovative social collaboration tool.