ibis Hotels eliminates radios, maintenance logs

After a successful six month pilot, ibis Hotels earned this year's innovation distinction at the Accor UK Gala Awards for its implementation of Connect Staff, a system designed to benefit both hotel staff and guests by improving communication and accountability between departments. Connect Staff is managed through a cloud-based content-management system and was developed by Monscierge. Monscierge first partnered with Accor in 2009 and together have deployed Monscierge Connect products to more than 400 branded properties spanning 43 countries.

The new staff tools has changed staff performance and increased communication between departments. The most significant evidence of increased operational efficiency with Connect Staff is the ibis 15 Minute Guarantee. If a guest request isn't delivered or an issue isn't resolved within 15 minutes, the guest receives a refund. By deploying Connect Staff, the average response time to guest affecting issue has reduced significantly.

"The system has helped us to reduce the time to respond to maintenance requests by up to 50 percent,” said Frederic Le Bras, assistant general manager, ibis London Blackfriars.

The intuitive design and architecture of Connect Staff helps with on-boarding new users, with training taking less than one hour per hotel. Senior team members can manage settings, users, and analytics reports, and brands are able to benchmark performance across multiple properties, regions and brands. Brands can quickly identify which hotels are performing well and which need assistance, facilities managers can spot trends and anomalies in maintenance defect reports and make informed capital expenditure decisions.

While all of these features allow for management to hone in on the prioritization of workloads, they've communicated that the most positive, disruptive change they've seen by implementing Connect Staff is the real-time communication and workflow between the hotel teams. With issues appearing instantaneously to the maintenance team and back-of-house teams, staff commented they are better prepared to execute multiple jobs.

Connect Staff's primary function for a single property is to provide the hotel staff the ability to easily communicate and to track and prioritize tasks throughout multiple departments. At a brand level, the reporting metrics and analytics feature provide significant insight across an entire collection instantly.