During the pandemic, hoteliers realised that the key to brand success was creating unique concepts, especially when it came to dining. Another significant realisation was embracing contactless technologies, like digital payments or QR menus.
Today, a Point of Sale (PoS) solution has become the de facto standard at checkout areas, whether at the reception counter or F&B outlets. In this article, a hotel owner and a hospitality professional share their distinctive views on how a seamless payment can offer a unified guest experience across multiple sales channels. Moreover, they examine how leveraging frictionless key elements in this payment journey can boost customer engagement levels and provide great conversational experiences, enabling guests to interact with hotel brands the way they love.
With hotels embracing digitalisation and frictionless payment over the past couple of years, how can a seamless PoS system offer a unified guest experience across multiple sales channels? Sonica Malhotra Kandhari, Joint MD, MBD Group: A PoS system allows the hotel to accept payments as it integrates with the existing hotel technology to help smooth business operations. It reduces the time spent in selecting products and payments, and enhances the guest experience as it comes equipped with multiple modes of payment options. With this, the guests can even avail the respective offers on credit cards.
Ullas Arora, Operations Manager, Crowne Plaza New Delhi Mayur Vihar Noida: Most hoteliers struggle to enhance guest experience and staff efficiency, as these are directly related to sales. Unified commerce is a significant step in enabling both. Leveraging technology can make many jobs more manageable. This explains why restaurant software solutions are desirable, but PoS systems are a must-have.
PoS integration is advantageous for hotel restaurants as it improves operations and guest experience. It gives guests the ability to choose whether to pay for their dinner at the restaurant or invoice it to their room to pay at checkout.
A unified system offers a bouquet of solutions enabling the teams to scroll through various tools for a seamless guest experience. This includes using the menu data to control margins, efficiently handling online orders, reservations, and deliveries, and improving the payment process. Moreover, they can boost sales with more efficient service, get reports for in-depth performance analysis, minimise the risk of error and misuse, monitor staff activity, and manage the payroll.
Did your hotel provide employees with web-based tools and custom-tailored reports consisting of analytics relevant to their areas of responsibility for swift decision-making capabilities? Sonica Malhotra Kandhari: We already use AI integrated tools that predict customer buying behaviour and help us amend our strategies over time. Since the last two years have brought changes in the demand and buying behaviour of the guests, we have also adapted to the upcoming business methods and technologies along with the up-gradation of our systems.
Ullas Arora: You must count on dashboards and reviews with real-time data from a POS with a web admin panel. These are reviews that we, along with our teams, may also by no means have had time to create earlier than getting a POS. Each machine is a bit one-of-a-kind, and the benefit of the interface performs a crucial position whilst you paint with data.
We focus on critical data that can be of great importance, like what was sold at any given time, who sold what in a shift, day, week, month, or quarter the payments methods used, performance trends, etc. The sales forecasting manages employee schedules, promotions, and specials while giving details about food costs, labour, and inventory expenses. This data from PoS systems gives management teams the information to make decisions that contribute to productivity. We are currently working with Infrasys for the PoS analysis which is further interfaced to Check SCM and Sun Systems, giving us a holistic picture of the operational efficacy.
How can an effective POS system boost customer engagement levels by giving hoteliers a 360º customer view based on payment data?
Sonica Malhotra Kandhari: An effective PoS system boosts customer engagement levels as it not only provides ease of payment by giving different payment methods such as cash, debit/credit cards, cheques, etc. but also helps in building strong customer relationships and provides a personalised guest experience. An increase in digital payments via specific channels like Paytm, as recorded by our PoS, has helped us make decisions based on enhancing the availability and acceptance of more digital payment channels and creating more options for the customers to buy our services.
Ullas Arora: In an increasing omnichannel and mobile-first world, digital channels help companies connect with guests even when they’re not physically present. Our CRM and PMS software give insights on the average spending of a guest at the hotel, their visits and preference customisations. This enables in development segmentation of guests like – Cannot Lose them (heavy users), At Hibernation (Having Low Visits), Loyal Customers, About to sleep, Potential Loyalists etc. This, in turn, assists in creating targeted reach campaigns that engage guests and provide dedicated offers.
How has the use of PoS helped your hotel improve its visibility into customer data and support data-driven decision-making while maximising its property’s top- and bottom-line performance?
Sonica Malhotra Kandhari: PoS has made our job easier as it can easily integrate with our existing systems to automatically add a charge to a guest’s final payment, rather than making the team manually add the expenses throughout the stay of the guest. Also, using it has helped us reduce the time spent on selecting products and payments.
Ullas Arora: Since it is actively involved in almost every daily activity of a hotel unit, a PoS system can record multiple bits of information, including inventory, transactions, staff performance and customer insights. PoS terminals collect enormous volumes of data in the raw format, which has minimal use. This needs to be integrated into a single place to offer a better scope of our business, which leads to maximum utility. After analysing, this data can show us the way to track and forecast inventory, optimise our marketing campaigns, gives us deep insights into your ideal customers, and much more.
An effective PoS system boosts customer engagement levels as it not only provides ease of payment by giving different payment methods such as cash, debit/credit cards, cheques, etc. but also helps in building strong customer relationships and provides a personalised guest experience.”
— Sonica Malhotra Kandhari, Joint Managing Director, MBD Group.
How can automatically integrating a PoS system with a range of other systems across your hotel’s portfolio help normalise disparate data into a single database for analytics, dashboarding and planning?
Sonica Malhotra Kandhari: A robust PoS system enables hotels to
monitor their financial performance in real-time. Moreover, it facilitates all administrative and management tasks and connects all the processes in one system. It also provides accurate monitoring of daily reports on sales, customer behaviour, and even staff productivity, which helps efficiently manage the hotel operation.
Ullas Arora: Integrated reporting can help a hotel explore value creation. It focuses on driving more authentic, comprehensive and meaningful information about all aspects of a unit’s performance and value creation story, delivering benefits for internal and external stakeholders.
How have you designed your POS system to provide an elevated guest experience, from the quick-glance screen with a user-friendly design to a fully customisable order panel that enables staff to save time when ordering during peak times?
Ullas Arora: A PoS system’s biggest USP is its ability to elevate guest experience and offer an attractive user interface (UI). Whenever we work with PoS partners, we make it a point to ensure that we are working on a process or a UI twice over.
The first is from the guest’s perspective and then we relook at it once again from the associate’s viewpoint. This is topped up with enhanced reporting tools. UI customisation is the key differentiator of a PoS system and should be developed after incorporating feedback and suggestions.
