Background

An alarmingly huge number of hotels follow a manual process when it comes to managing their guests’ complaints and requests.

We have talked about this in detail in our article titled how hotels manage guest complaints and requests.

Though on the onset this process works, it is riddled with flaws and inefficiencies.

The Problem

A process cannot be efficient if it is dependent on any individual or a particular group and does not have a strong mechanism to analyse and improvise.

A process cannot be efficient if it is dependent on any individual or a particular group and does not have a strong mechanism to analyse and improvise.

The guest complaint and request management process that hotels predominantly follow is completely manual.

When the guest makes a call to the operator or respective department, the process that hotels follow is totally manual.

We have discussed this in how hotels manage guest complaints and requests.

This manual process makes it highly impossible to consistently offer good timely service to the guests.

Also the managers and the management cannot view reports to understand important metrics and scope for improvement.

The Solution

Guest request management is the most ignored aspect of hotel management technology.

The solution to this inefficient process of managing guest complaints and requests is to use a software.

The software to this problem is called guest complaint and request management software. It can also be called as guest request management software, guest complaint management software and service optimization software.

The different names might be confusing but they are pretty much the same.

An ideal guest complaint and request management software should be able to the following:

Ability to create tickets for every guest call

When the guests make calls to the operator or to respective departments with their complaints or service needs the employee receiving the call should be able to record the same in the computer. Which they should be able to create it as a ticket or task in the system.

Assign tickets to the right user in the right department

Once the ticket (aka task) is created in the system it should automatically be assigned to the right person in the right department. This will simplify the process of assigning the tickets to the right person and will reduce the workload of the employees and will make them much more efficient.

In addition to that a software can do this process again and again at scale. This means that unlike a human, the software can follow the process of assigning the tickets to the right person in the right department irrespective of the number of tickets.

Escalate the tickets that are getting delayed

Escalating the tickets is by far the most crucial aspect of any complaint management process. The tickets that get assigned to the right person in the right department does mean that they will be resolved at the right time.

We need escalation to ensure that the tickets (guest complaints and requests) are resolved at the right time consistently.

To put things in perspective let’s say that if a guest in room number 101, wants a cup of coffee to be delivered to his room. Let’s assume that the hotel’s brand standard to do this is 10 minutes.

This means that the coffee should be delivered to room 101 in 10 minutes from the time the guest first called.

If the person who got this ticket assigned fails to deliver the coffee within 10 minutes then the escalation kicks in.

Escalation alerts the supervisor or department head or both about the delay and they can intervene and ensure that there is no further delay in addressing the guest complaint or request.

Escalation also increases employee accountability and creates a checkpoint at every level to avoid any untoward incident with the guest.

Offer meaningful reports to analyse the strengths and weakness.

With the guest complaint and request management taken care of the next most important requirement for the hotel in this front is reports.

The daily reports from the software can be used in the daily status calls or the daily morning meetings to discuss about the previous day’s successes and failures.

These meetings are more productive with the reports and the GM of the hotel can take decisive actions to improve the overall guest experience.

Benefits of a guest complaint and request management software

• - Increasing employee accountability at every level and empowering them to offer great service to the guests at every level.


• - Finding out repeated complaints faced by the guests. This can empower hotels to plan an appropriate maintenance activity at the right location or with right asset.


• - It would empower hotels to offer great service to the guests consistently.


• - The guest complaints and requests can be resolved or fulfilled at a fast pace without much delay. This increases guest satisfaction.


• - A happy guest helps hotels in their marketing initiatives by talking about its service in his / her circle. Word of mouth marketing has always been the largest source of qualified leads for any business.


• - Happy guests guests help in managing or building a positive online reputation as the guests do not leave negative reviews or are inclined to leave positive reviews.