Aruba’s Amsterdam Manor Beach Resort, which implemented ALICE’s full suite of hospitality technology products in August of this year, can already report meaningful improvements in staff communication and guest satisfaction. The intimate and picturesque resort, set on award-winning Eagle Beach, is using ALICE Staff, ALICE Concierge, and ALICE Guest to align its front of house and back of house teams, as well as provide its guests with convenient ways to get in touch with the hotel. ALICE is the hospitality industry’s leading operations technology, connecting every department of a hotel with one platform for all staff communication and guest requests. ALICE recently acquired concierge software provider GoConcierge to augment its technology and customer service offering.
Before implementing ALICE in the summer of 2017, staff at Amsterdam Manor communicated with one another primarily through radios, emails, and phone calls. This siloed method of communication challenged accountability and alignment (it wasn’t uncommon for multiple of the resort’s hyper-attentive staff members to address the same concern simultaneously), and, in the case of radios, created a noisy distraction for both guests and staff. When staff were out of range of the radios, or didn’t respond right away, staff would spend time tracking each other down across the 13-acre property, hampering productivity.
Now, after only a few months of using ALICE, Amsterdam Manor’s General Manager Alfred Kaufmann estimates communication complications have been reduced by some 60- to 70%. Whereas previously, determining the status of a guest request required a chain of exchanges between staff members, now, everyone on staff can log into ALICE and immediately see the status of the guest request or internal work order.
Kaufmann says his staff have responded enthusiastically to how much easier ALICE has made communication and coordination. “My staff can now quickly check in with each other online. When someone comes on shift, they can just post a short message, ‘Hey guys, I’m here,’ and everyone who needs to know, is notified seamlessly.” The GM also says he’s pleased with how open staff of all ages have been to embrace the technology. Earlier concerns about whether some of his staff would be as quick to take to ALICE as others were quickly allayed, once everyone saw how useful this new type of communication would be.
For Kaufmann, use of ALICE represents a sea change in his ability as General Manager to oversee his staff, as well as keep up to the moment with activity on property. “For me, ALICE is fabulous. In the morning, I can look at the ALICE log and see immediately the activity from the day before. If there is a problem with the A/C somewhere on property, for example, I can see it in the log and in the tickets and I can see whether or not the issue was resolved. This makes things very open – I can see exactly what’s going on at all times.”
Most importantly, Kaufmann says ALICE is helping him where it counts, and that’s in the guest experience. “We do this for one reason,” Kaufmann says of his and his team’s drive for better operations, “and that’s guest satisfaction. ALICE allows us to respond to guest requests and guest issues far more quickly than we could before. Establishing a record of guest preferences and requests also helps us improve our relationships with guests and better anticipate their needs.”
