US hospitality industry is one of the fuelling industries that generated $1.6 trillion and supported 7.8 million jobs in 2017. According to the statistics by Deloitte, US hotel bookings grew from $116 billion in 2009 to $185 billion in 2017, while airline revenue soared from $155 billion to $222 billion during the same year.
With increasing volume, the competitive and global marketplace poses additional challenges for this industry such as:
- Maintaining consistency across client-communication and processes
- Sharing and accessing information (daily task maintenance, complaint management & closure data, etc.), knowledge & experience (standard operating procedures, business reports, insights, etc.) across locations in real-time.
- Offering enhanced customer experience through various measures including online booking facility, customer feedback mechanism, etc.
- Devising a strategy for productivity enhancement of the staff.
- Improving cost-efficiency by optimizing labor scheduling and staff training, appliance maintenance scheduling, enhancing employee onboarding experience and streamlining food and beverage to reduce waste.
- Offering measures for employee satisfaction for staff retention.
- Implementing robust data security to secure customer data.
Microsoft SharePoint, with its impeccable in-built features and functionalities, can come to the rescue for small and medium hospitality companies by offering them productivity boost through employee and customer satisfaction.
Some of the ways these organizations can benefit from SharePoint are –
- Centralized information access across locations
Microsoft SharePoint intranet offers centralized document and information management. It enables your staff to access information like statuses related to service, requests and maintenance, knowledge such as news updates, events and activities across locations from any device. With its powerful search functionality and built-in analytics, SharePoint can be used as a corporate knowledge base. A single version of information accessed across the organization also reflects in the communication consistency across clients and subsequently, enhanced efficiency.
- Enterprise-wide seamless collaboration
SharePoint offers enterprise-wide collaboration. Thanks to its complete integration with Microsoft OneDrive, SharePoint allows its users to share files and information from anywhere with real-time co-authoring.
- Automate business processes
One of the major advantage of SharePoint lies in its ability to create and implement powerful workflows. Workflows enable automated movement of documents to efficiently manage common business processes by attaching business logic to items or documents in a SharePoint Library. Workflows act as a powerful tool to streamline time and cost to coordinate business processes like document review, approvals and similar tasks. It efficiently manages and tracks human tasks by sending e-mail alerts to the participants of the workflow with task instructions and a link to the request that needs approval. Thus, workflows can be a handy solution for the hospitality industry for taking an approval, collecting feedback, collecting digital signatures on a document or form and even to track an issue which can enhance your staff productivity significantly by reducing turn-around-time drastically.
- Enhanced cost-effectivity and efficiency
You can use SharePoint Solution to manage various business requirements including document management and intranet. SharePoint OOTB offers you a cost-effective solution with the required functionality. You can further scale up and customize your SharePoint implementation to answer your business-volume and specific needs such as complaint management, feedback collection, facility management, service management and many more. It can be customized into a solution that fits your business requirement.
- Offer employee satisfaction
The talent gap in the US hospitality industry has increased from 353,000 in 2009 to 1,139,000 in 2018. To attract new employees, hospitality companies are paying up to 25-30% of their revenue as compared to 15% a few years back. It has mandated US-based small and medium hospitality companies to take rigorous measures to retain their existing workforce. SharePoint offers a unified and engaging experience for all employees in an organization and keeps them connected. It ensures better collaboration, enhanced productivity and improved employee satisfaction by giving a sense of belonging and being a part of the team, resulting in better employee retention.
- Robust data security and compliance
In today’s digital world, data security is a concern for all companies big and small. It’s specifically a major concern for small and medium hospitality companies. SharePoint takes care of data security and industry-compliance with complete end-to-end encryption, highly configurable and powerful data controls and integrated data loss prevention. Thus, while SharePoint offers hassle-free collaboration and sharing information, it also protects businesses by preventing employees from disclosing sensitive data intentionally or accidentally. SharePoint administrators can easily achieve this by enforcing auditing policies and security settings from a centralized dashboard.
- Full Cloud enablement
SharePoint can be implemented either on-premise (with in-house data centers) or online. With SharePoint Online which is completely Cloud-based, you can further reduce the cost by enjoying automated IT updates provided by Microsoft at no additional cost. Additionally, it eliminates the need to spend on running your servers or high-end systems.
- Advanced technology
As the world is becoming increasingly smaller, there is a growing emphasis on flawless and hassle-free communication among the staff and also with the clients. Thus, enterprise-wide communication capabilities and the technologies that can facilitate this collaboration are imperative in the hospitality industry. The stats by PricewaterhouseCoopers revealed that 70% of millennials are more likely to book a hotel with tech amenities such as mobile payments, keyless entry, etc. From this perspective, SharePoint offers extensive capabilities in terms of various workflows and communication and collaboration features.
Moreover, as a core part of Microsoft Office 365, SharePoint guarantees 99.9% uptime which is a vital aspect for small and medium hospitality companies for offering reliability and client satisfaction.
With its truly collaborative features, simplified sharing, hassle-free implementation and integration backed by robust security and up-time, Microsoft SharePoint can be the best collaboration and communication solution for your hospitality business. With our deep domain niche, experience and certified SharePoint consultants, we offer comprehensive SharePoint services including SharePoint consulting, development, migration and integration. For availing our competitively priced quality SharePoint services, contact us today.
