Personalized Guest Room Service Guarantees and E-Butler Overview

(iv) Guarantee of Personalized Services

1. Utilize customer history records to provide conditions and guarantees for personalized services.

Guest history files are an excellent basis for hotels to provide personalized services. In the information age, guest history files are themselves a database, recording all guest consumption information. This includes both common information such as name, age, and job title, and information that allows hotels to better provide personalized services, such as guest preferences, spending power, floor preferences, beverage preferences, and even past complaints. These can all be recorded in the guest history file, serving as a medium or carrier for personalized service. A comprehensive guest history file not only facilitates better service in the future but also prevents fluctuations and gaps in service quality due to changes in personnel, environment, or other conditions, avoiding a stark contrast for guests. Establishing guest history files helps hotels better understand market trends, grasp guest demographics, consumption patterns, and guest opinions and requirements. This allows hotels to adapt to changing market trends, improve the targeting of their services, enhance guest satisfaction, and ultimately achieve long-term development.

2. Waiters/waitresses must have a strong service-oriented mindset.

In daily service, some guests directly express their personalized service needs, but many others are not. Instead, these needs are subconsciously revealed or implied through their language or behavior during the transaction. For example, a guest taking notes while on the phone might mean they need a pen. Upon careful observation, the server should promptly offer them paper and pen. This requires servers to have keen observation skills, quickly and accurately capturing the guest's latent needs. Such meticulous observation and action first and foremost require servers to have a strong service-oriented mindset.

3. Employee training is key to providing personalized service.

Frontline staff are the primary practitioners of personalized service in hotels. Managers should consciously improve and cultivate employees' service awareness and skills, and strengthen training for frontline staff. Personalized service requires employees to grasp both the common, basic, static, and explicit needs of guests, as well as analyze their individual, specific, dynamic, and implicit needs. A waiter's service awareness and keen observation skills are not innate but require continuous training and guidance. Only in this way can their service level and quality be significantly improved.

III. Guest Room E-Butler

In recent years, with changes in consumer media consumption and even consumption demands, the hotel industry's service supply has faced challenges. Traditional hotel brochures, menus, and room phone numbers have become mere "lonely decorations" for many guests, failing to meet their increasingly fragmented, diverse, and personalized consumption needs. Facing these "digitally-minded" guests, it's necessary to integrate hotel facilities and services into their digital journey, seamlessly blending them with guests' digital consumption. This has given rise to smart hotels, smart rooms, and the Room E-Butler. The Room E-Butler, also known as the Smart Room Butler (or Digital Smart Room Butler, Room Information Butler, Room Service Butler, Virtual Personal Assistant, etc.), is part of the hotel's intelligent management system. It integrates smart home, AI, and IoT functions, focusing on digital services in hotel rooms and providing intelligent self-service through interactive voice and other methods. This brings hotels high technology, a superior experience, and enhanced competitiveness, allowing guests to experience the hotel in the coolest way.

(I) E-Butler Terminal for Guest Rooms

Different hotels use different intelligent management systems, and the corresponding guest room e-butler terminals vary. Generally, the following five types of guest room e-butler terminals are commonly used.

(1) Guest room terminals. Generally, each room is equipped with a smart terminal device, such as a smart speaker, tablet computer, AI smart terminal, or a designated smart system terminal. For example, the guest rooms of the InterContinental Shanghai Sheshan Hotel are equipped with Baidu DuerOS Xiaodu Zaijia (hotel version) smart speakers; the Hangzhou Xixuan Hotel and the Westin Sanya Hotel use Tmall Genie.

(2) Guest terminals. Common guest terminals include mobile apps, WeChat mini programs, and WeChat official accounts, through which guests can select services themselves.

(3) Staff and Owner Terminals. Staff and owner terminals typically use mobile apps, WeChat mini-programs, websites, or other terminals to design services for guests, and have functions such as service response and data storage. Through the terminal, service personnel can clearly know the status of the rooms and the needs of the guests.

(4) Delivery robot. Mainly used to deliver small items to hotel guests.

(5) Supporting notification equipment, such as voice broadcast printers, etc.

(II) Functionality of Guest Room E-Butler

Currently, common smart hotel management systems mainly have three functions:

1. Guest Room Service Management

Guests can use self-service terminals to inquire about hotel services, book hotel dining, meeting rooms, car rentals, and various room services such as delivery, room cleaning, wake-up calls, and room service, as well as nearby services such as food delivery and travel.

For example, the intelligent system can be accessible to hotel managers and staff at the front desk, housekeeping center, and engineering department, allowing them to remotely control guest room equipment, receive all information from guest room status and service requests, and respond quickly to guest needs. It can also record guest service requests and response times in real time, and perform data statistics and analysis of guest room services to improve the hotel's management level and service quality.

2. Smart guest room control

Guests can control smart products via voice, mobile phone, or touchscreen. This includes turning the room's TV, lights, air conditioning, and curtains on and off, adjusting TV frequencies, lighting, and air conditioning temperature, and requesting room service such as "bring me a bottle of water" or "bring me a pair of slippers." They can also customize personalized scenes, such as morning mode, romantic mode, reading mode, and silent mode, switching between them at will.

3. Self-service inquiry and processing

Guests can use self-service terminals to handle various services, such as checking bills, checking out with one click, extending their stay online, booking invoices, and providing feedback and suggestions. They can also search for encyclopedic information and customize services.