Leonia Resorts in Hyderabad has a holistic approach of combining leisure, business, recreation, rejuvenation and relaxation, all in one location. It is a space where one can multi-task and switch modes between work, fun, learning, partying and relaxation at the same time at the same place. Leonia required a system which could help meet its employee and guest demands as well as their expectations.

Also, it wanted to offer enterprise-class features to back office process automation for staff, to help with their business processes, other communication dependencies and help attend guest requests, all with minimum turnaround time.

Furthermore, the resort also wanted to provide a unified access to its customers—while in the room or roaming in the resort on the Wi-Fi phone. Ergo, the company decided to deploy Avaya Communication Manager solution to provide its guests with a rich user experience. The implementation of the system on the resort was done on an investment of $1.2 million in the year 2008.

“With such a large campus, one was unable to pinpoint the position of each of our internal staff, which was facilitated by the UC solution,” says Surendra Kadali, CTO, Leonia Resorts.

The phone equipment selected was the Avaya One-X desktop Edition 9640 working on wideband technology, which apart from offering all the hospitality features, delivers the speech of the called party as close as possible to natural speech.

A branch solution was also deployed at the corporate office to remain connected with the resort. “On the roadmap is application integration with the telephony system, whereby guests would be able to view a weather report and various locations across the resort on the screen of their phones and further have access to interactive applications like taxi booking, viewing the city map, getting latest news updates and so on,” says Kadali.

Overall, the solution delivered reliability and scalability, which was inclined towards enhancing the overall guest experience.

Initial hiccups

Before the implementation, the resort had trouble in reaching out to its internal people. It was difficult for the call centre to track each and every sales call and report the time spent on each of them. Mobility was another issue as the resort is spread over 350 acres of land.

Avaya offered Leonia an all-IP UC solution with 2,500 IP phones which were fully enabled with hospitality capabilities for a better guest experience. This platform provided seamless connectivity to Leonia’s staff, thereby enabling faster decision-making with availability of right information at the right time. The aim was to enhance guest experience, which can help create a differentiator for Leonia and enable business growth.

Providing Wi-Fi mobility by integrating the access points to work with voice and ensure security as well as seamless voice connectivity was the challenge faced by Leonia in the initial phase of implementation. XML (Extensible Markup Language) integration and continuous updates being pushed to the phone was the other issue confronting them.

Implementation

The UC solution deployed at Leonia consists of four products: One-X-desktop, One-X-mobile edition, video enabled soft phones and SIP phones. “The entire implementation took place in four stages,” informs Kadali.

Any incoming call coming to Leonia lands at its call centre. From there it gets connected to the concerned person. An incoming call log is maintained to ensure whether it is a sales call or an office staff call. For each customer call, necessary actions are taken to track the response and check the status reports from the respective team members.

For key staff, the Avaya One-X soft phone was made available on their laptops, to enable them to connect to the communication network from anywhere, anytime. Further, all online staff could chat, transfer files, establish voice channels, video conference, have conference calls, or get calls on any of their mobiles or landlines.

“The solutions have delivered reliability and scalability in our process, thereby adding to the enhanced guest experience. The user-friendly UC solutions have brought about operational effectiveness. In a business like ours, customer responsiveness is of paramount importance. We have implemented call centre solutions to accept guest requests and process the same with the respective departments. It helped a lot to cut down the service request processing time,” claims Chakravarthi Raju, CMD, Leonia.

Avaya’s UC solutions gave the resort a host of other benefits like a centralised help desk, special guest functionalities, XML application to phone for restaurant services, weather check, route map, weekend event, 64-party conference bride, SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) server for soft phones, ‘click to call’ facility and Skype integration for their guests and employees.

The solution was also able to securely offer multimedia calling, conferencing and collaboration capability on voice and video to customers, without having to bother about people misusing the network and services.

The resort has become more responsive to the customer and offers services for voice, data and video conferencing and sharing presentations. Further, the resort offers spa services, event specific services, IT services to other customers in the hospitality segment, and has decided that Avaya UC solutions will be able to cater to the expanding needs of the business.