How a Digital Worker called ‘Bertie’ helped Clermont better manage hotel bookings.

About Clermont

Clermont Hotel Group is a first-class hospitality company, operating 17 hotels with over 5,000 bedrooms across three brands. What makes Clermont distinctive is that they connect personally with guests during their stay, and yet also use the latest technology to make operations as efficient and smooth as possible. With a strong history of working in the hotels sector, Centelli approached Clermont to see how a Digital Worker might be able to assist them in their Contact Centre operations.

The issue we solved

Hotel Contact Centres (or Reservation Service Centres – RSC) handle all the various new bookings, amendments, and cancellations. These bookings arrive from different partner organizations (Corporate Agents, Tour Operators, Online Agents etc.), in different formats which need actioning in different ways with the hotel’s Property Management System (PMS) – in this case, Oracle Opera.

Clermont was facing challenges in recruiting and retaining staff in the RSC. They engaged Centelli just before COVID, and foreseeing what was ahead, on-boarded their Digital Worker during the quiet lockdown period.

Added complications

Every booking partner delivers details into a hotel differently, and each drops different amounts of that data automatically into the PMS. For example, some would transfer booking information but not the payment details – meaning staff had to cross-check and update missing information.

There was a large variation in the activities that the Digital Worker had to pick up, whether a booking, amendment, or cancellation. During the lockdown period, we therefore created mock bookings based on historic transactions, in order to build confidence in the RSC team that it was achieving 100% accuracy.

Benefits delivered everyday

• Reduced costs: Staff time is better spent on more bespoke guest requests etc.
• Happier team: This leads to better retention, easier recruitment etc.
• Happier customers: Due to fewer errors, lost bookings etc.

Chris Ball, Business Development Director, Clermont Hotel Group said:

“We already had some automation within our booking processes, but with so many partners and integrations, there was still a lot of manual data transfer to be done. Centelli worked with us to understand that a Digital Worker could perfectly complement existing processes, by behaving just like a human does – but way more efficiently.”

Melanie Cole, Head of RSC, Clermont Hotel Group said:

“Having a Digital Worker as a part of the team is fantastic! It takes on the more monotonous tasks, more accurately and more efficiently, leaving the rest of the staff to deal with more bespoke requests. And as a business focused 100% on customer satisfaction, that’s a wonderful position to be in.”

Jan Bakker
770-374-8839
Centelli