Case Study - How 31West Helped Large Hotel Chain

How 31West Helped A Big Hotel Group Manage Its IT Help Desk

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About the Client

A large hotel chain with over 4000 properties across the US. 70% of the hotels cater to business travelers & 30% cater to leisure travelers.

The Problem

The hotel business operates 24/7/365. It’s imperative that their IT support is also available 24/7 to resolve issues quickly and ensure uninterrupted business.

Our client was challenged with high IT staff turnover, unscheduled leaves, PTOs, and sick leaves. The IT team was perpetually understaffed & overworked. Due to the high turnover of the IT team, managing the employee life cycle in Office 365 was always behind schedule. This was impacting business operations.

The company was bleeding in unused O365 license fees and delays in ticket resolution.

They were looking for a reliable & experienced outsourced IT help desk company with 24/7/365 operations.

Impact

  • Turnaround time of over 2-3 days.
  • Growth concerns with management & investors.
  • Guest satisfaction levels were dropping
  • IT team was over-worked and stressed

Causes

We identified 3 main causes for these problems.

  1. Inadequate IT help desk team
  2. Managing 24/7 operations
  3. Inefficient SOPs

Our Solution

After signing up with the client, we took the following approach in sequential order:

  1. Study the client’s IT systems, tools & team structure.
  2. We prepared a simple & efficient workflow to manage the employee life cycle.
  3. In consultation with the client’s internal IT team. we redesigned SOPs to minimize back and forth between departments.
  4. New SOPs for employee onboarding, employee termination & internal staff movement with vetted with the respective departments.
  5. After getting a sign-off from the internal IT Team, we started handling tickets as per the new SOPs.
  6. Respective departmental heads & their team members were automatically notified of the staffing changes.
  7. Email distribution lists were updated daily.
  8. Microsoft Office 365 licenses were deleted instantly to save cost.
  9. After streamlining the employee life-cycle process, we focused on other tickets.

We optimized ticket handing processes by clubbing similar tickets into separate buckets and assigning them to a single engineer. This helped our engineers to resolve similar tickets quickly. We reached out to ticket requestors on MS Teams or phone calls to update them on the completion of their ticket. This practice significantly reduced multiple ticket creation by the same person for the same issue. This also increased the visibility of the IT team & our proactiveness was appreciated.

Result – A positive brand image and delighted customers

As a result of the delivery of our comprehensive solutions, the overall turnaround time in addressing support tickets was reduced to <4 hours. Customer satisfaction levels soon saw a steep curve with a heightened satisfaction level, about 60% more than what was recorded earlier. NPS improved to 9.2.

This helped our client retain existing customers, renew contacts while up-selling other offerings.

Management & Investors were confident of sustainable growth.

Conclusion

Our client saved significant costs on MS Office licenses and IT staffing costs. The internal team had more personal free time, they were less stressed & were now focusing on implementing new business systems that were pending for months.

The client’s employees were happy to see their tickets being resolved quickly and they loved being proactively informed about their ticket resolution.