Incom Business Systems Ltd - The Wrightington Hotel & Country Club case study - Mitel SX2000
The
Wrightington Hotel & Country Club, privately
owned and a member of the Best Western Hotel group, wished
to upgrade from
their analogue telephone system to a complete communications
solution.
Their requirements included full integration with their
existing
front of house system (PMS),
more efficient routing of incoming calls and the opportunity
to offer sophisticated
communications
services to business customers. Incom Business Systems'
solution was the provision of Primary
Rate digital lines with DDI numbers
and the installation of a Mitel SX-2000 with
voicemail. Each extension was configured with a mailbox
and bedroom handsets featured a data point allowing internet
access for
hotel
guests. The networking of all PCs
in the hotel completed the full voice and data solution.
The
Wrightington Hotel & Country
Club
Mitel
Networks are the No. 1 supplier of telephone systems
to 4 & 5* hotels in the UK, and have
systems in place in most of the main hotel groups throughout
the
national and global marketplace.
As a standard feature, most telephone systems include the
ability to pass data to call
logging software
however,
the Mitel
SX-2000 has an inbuilt bi-directional link enabling
data to be passed in both directions between the PMS and
the telephone system. This enables true integration with
all major front of house systems.
When a
guest's details are entered into the PMS, they are
also registered on the telephone system
which allocates the guest name to the relevant
room extension. Therefore, when the guest dials reception
or room
service etc. they are immediately identifiable to the
staff member,
enabling improved customer service.
When a
guest checks out of the hotel, in addition to calculating
any call charges to be levied to
their room, the SX-2000 clears their name from the
extension and deletes all messages from the mailbox.
Furthermore,
all calls from that extension are barred until
the next guest is checked into that room, meaning that
no unauthorised calls can be made.
To keep
reception aware of the "real-time" status
of rooms, housekeepers can enter one of a series
of codes into an extension
to inform the front
of house system whether the room is ready for check-in
or requires cleaning etc.
The installation
of the new communications system coincided with the extension
of the Wrightington Hotel & Country Club and its upgrade
from 3 to 4* rating. The hotel reception and administration
department were relocated and an additional 27 bedrooms
were added. As part
of the overall improvements to the hotel, Helen Hart, General
Manager,
wanted
to ensure
that incoming calls were more efficiently routed. "We
wanted to cut down on the number of calls being unnecessarily
answered by hotel reception and give callers the opportunity
to dial directly into specific departments, for example
to the leisure centre or to administration staff".
The provision of Primary rate digital lines with DDI numbers
enabled direct dialling in to individual
extension numbers, thereby alleviating unnecessary call
traffic through reception. Click
here for our Jargon Buster definition of Direct Dialling
Inwards.
Like many hotels,
The Wrightington Hotel & Country Club had previously
relied on Meter
Pulse Detection (MPD) in order
to calculate outgoing call charges for guests. As this service
is only provided on BT analogue lines it has meant that,
in
the past, hoteliers have been unable to take advantage of
the cheaper call rates
offered by
other Service Providers. Also, as there is currently
no equivalent service available on digital
lines, hoteliers wishing to upgrade
to the benefits of ISDN have
often struggled to find a reliable solution to calculate
call charges. At the Wrightington
Hotel & Country Club, the Least
Cost Routing (LCR) feature on the Mitel SX-2000 was programmed
to route calls through Incom Network Services.
Information is passed from the telephone system to
the PMS and outgoing
call charges are accurately calculated based on destination,
time of day and length of call. The result is reduced call
revenue
and
overall improved margins for the
hotel.
Before
the upgrade of their communications system, the Wrightington
Hotel & Country
Club had several PCs with individual analogue lines
and modems for accessing the internet and emails
via a dial-up
account. This meant that staff could each connect
an unlimited number of times a day and was therefore
expensive
for both
line rental and call charges. As the hotel was not
in a BT Broadband area,
Incom Business Systems arranged for
the provision of Basic
Rate ISDN for internet access and installed additional
network points in the administration department,
along with a router, and a mail server. The mail
server now connects
to the internet on an hourly basis to check for messages.
All users share the same connection thereby dispatching
with the need for irregular individual dial-up and
resulting in reduced costs.
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