Today’s Tools Put Hospitality Solutions in Workers’ Hands
This article by FileMaker Inc. discusses how to give employees the tools they need to succeed in the demanding hospitality field.
There’s long been a growing awareness that there is life beyond spreadsheets and desktop-bound databases and that IT staff are not the only people who can build technology solutions. Now, hospitality organizations of all sizes are realizing how to harness this concept and put it into practice.
Taking Ownership
Those in the hospitality industry are used to creative problem-solving, often on the go.
But traditionally, they’ve had to wait on the IT department to deliver their technology solutions on a custom level. Today, professionals want custom apps – solutions that are specific to their business. But finding a developer who understands their business as well as they do is essentially impossible. So then, using a tool that enables them to create a customized app or other solution is about taking ownership of the problem and solving it themselves.
So then, why not give them the tools that are easy enough for them to use to create the app itself? One of the key problems hospitality professionals have is the fitness of apps for the workload in their businesses. So, a tool that enables the hospitality pro take control is a huge benefit for organizations.
It’s a huge relief to the IT team, since business demands are immense, creating a time crunch that IT can’t keep up with. One way to offload this IT burden is if, instead of IT creating all these apps, hospitality professionals step in to create the apps themselves. Platforms that don’t require extensive coding experience provide an easy, quick way to address workflow, mapping of information in external sources and mobile app capabilities.
Custom app development platforms empower hospitality companies to take control of their data and put it to work for them, increasing productivity, instead of employees constantly chasing it. It is possible to scale the apps over time as needed, and these apps offer strong reporting and publishing features.
Smarter Operations, Rising Profits
Based in Mexico, Vida Vacations is a multi-million-dollar company that sells timeshares and club memberships. When the company wanted a better way to track its sales team’s output, it decided to create a custom app. They were having trouble tracking this information because many of its records were still on paper; some had even been lost in moves or floods. The data that was digitized was spread across Mac and Windows computers.
Vida Vacations selected a custom app development platform that enabled seamless integration across multiple devices and operating systems. An executive assistant with no development experience created a prototype for a mobile tracking system that features personalized goals for each sales associate. The app manages quotas and interactions between salespeople and clients, putting all salespeople on a level playing field.
In addition, the assistant created profiles for each sales associate and used these profiles to match them with specialized training and coaching, which improved retention and performance.
However, Vida Vacations’ big custom app win came at the Vallarta sales office, where managers began using their custom app to gather data about the successful matches between sales reps and customers. Managers used the data to pair the best-suited sales rep with each prospect for the next morning’s meeting. As a result, sales shot up by 12 percent. For Vida Vacations, that’s between $10 and $20 million.
These days, the company uses its custom app to manage hiring candidate information, and time cards have been replaced with facial recognition readers on mobile devices. The company continues to use its custom app to make operations smarter and more productive as it recognizes the tremendous competitive advantage the app offers.
Enhanced Hospitality
Workers in the hospitality industry want to give their guests the best possible experience, and they can’t do that if they are trying to gather data from three different spreadsheets. A custom app makes information accessible, increasing productivity, and now hospitality pros don’t have to wait for the IT department to build one for them. With the right tools, hospitality pros can create their own solutions, add value for guests and event improve sales.