How To Streamline Hotel Catering Management In 2018
Recently we’ve been talking a lot at Event Temple HQ about how we can really streamline Hotel Catering and Event Management. We aren’t talking about incremental change. We want to shave off hundreds of hours of inefficiency per hotel, per year. In many ways, the Catering And Events Manager has three jobs in one. Their job is to plan and execute events, turn existing inquiries into bookings and prospect for new business while maintaining relationships with past clients. For a hotel to increase their MICE revenue, they need to focus on growth and relationship management. Our goal then, is to do everything in our power as a software provider to give them more time to do that.
Automated Inquiry Management
When we examined how hotels sell to inbound inquiries for meetings and events, we found a high level of inefficiency. More often than not, most leads were managed strictly through an email inbox without a formal structure in place for setting up phone calls, site visits, proposals and follow ups. We feel that in order to efficiently manage inbound inquiries, hotels need a visual pipeline system defined around their specific sales process. In the example below, we have outlined a sample sales pipeline where each inquiry is displayed as a visual card, divided into stages. Each stage represents a step in the sales cycle.
When the lead has signed the Banquet Event Order, they become a booking and turn green in the pipeline. By using a visual system outside of email, it is much easier to forecast potential revenue from meetings and events at a glance. Additionally, Event Temple provides automated email follow up for each stage in the sales process. Maybe you want to remind a potential client about their upcoming site visit. You can use automation to do so. If you haven’t heard back from an inquiry, you can also set Event Temple to send personalized email reminders until they reply. Upon receiving their email response, the system will automatically stop sending reminders. Through a more efficient, visual and automated sales process, we are confident that Event Temple can reduce time spent on inbound sales responses by up to 80%.
Book Meeting Space Online
Another inefficiency we have identified is the inability for small meeting spaces to be booked online. Hotel rooms can easily be booked online but meeting spaces still must be booked manually. We recently spent a few days with the Catering team at Hilton Hotels and immediately noticed that the back and forth conversation around Banquet Event Orders was particularly time consuming. Often times, hotels would offer a discount on various aspects of the meeting room booking and/or catering if room bookings were made as well. The client therefore wanted to know exactly what those discounts were and often made a large variety of requests via phone and email to see what could be worked out. After watching this process for several days, it became clear to us that potential clients need a way to book space and earn discounts online. Hotels need a way to protect that information from competitors while still offering it to interested clients. We feel that reducing this back and forth would save Catering Sales Managers hundreds of hours over the course of the year.
Meeting Space Inventory Control
Another key aspect of booking meetings online is the ability for hotels to control their meeting space inventory. For example, hotels often know if their meeting space is available, booked or on hold, but often times there can be issues with food/beverage availability, furniture and A/V. If a hotel hosts a meeting and vital equipment is damaged at the event, it is important that the inventory is taken out of the online meeting room booking system in real time, otherwise a room could be potentially booked without having the proper resources to execute the event. Additionally, live inventory control on available chairs, tables, food, drink, A/V, etc. even without online meeting room booking would drastically reduce lag time between booking confirmation for potential clients, providing better customer service.
Manual Document Generation
Manual document generation is cumbersome and unnecessary for hotels in the modern computing age, yet we are always surprised when we walk into brand new hotels that are using archaic data management and document generation solutions. Invoices, Contracts, Banquet Event Orders, Kitchen Orders and Event Calendars should be able to be generated dynamically from client files without any additional data entry. Let’s say for example, your client requests a change to their BEO. You should be able to manually edit the client file from your computer in the Catering And Events office, then click a button to change the BEO and send the updated version to the client. Unfortunately, many hotels are still re-writing information from the client file onto BEOs, Invoices, etc in Microsoft Word or other.
Summary
By making four simple changes, we believe hotels could save hundreds of hours per year booking meetings and events. By automating inbound sales call scheduling, follow ups, site visits, BEOs and proposals hotels could reduce their time spend on inbound leads by up to 80% while increasing their revenue. Additionally, by enabling meeting and event space to be booked online, hotels could provide clients with better customer service, less hours dedicated to sales and event planning and enable third parties to assist in booking their meeting and event space passively. Last, by eliminating manual document creation and data entry, Catering Management teams could free up their time from administrative tasks. This would free up their time to spend the majority of their job prospecting, maintaining and strengthening relationships with past clients and executing events with less stress, more clarity and a stronger focus on customer service.
We believe that every hotel should dedicate significant resources to intentionally cutting down on unnecessary administrative tasks.
What do you think?
Is your hotel actively looking for ways to improve efficiency to differentiate yourselves from your competition?
