Success Story

Top service due to digitalising processes and improving internal communication

An extremely well-structured trial phase leads to outstanding results in just a short space of time. Since almost all processes at The Mandala Berlin are managed by hotelkit, staff members have more time for their guests.

Information about the Customer & Challenges

The Mandala Berlin is the only privately managed luxury hotel in the German capital. Centrally located on Potsdamer Platz, it offers bright and spacious luxury rooms of 5-star quality for its guests. Other highlights include the hotel’s own 2-star FACIL restaurant along with the outstanding service one might expect from an international luxury hotel.

The Mandala Berlin also has a clear objective: providing the highest standards of quality for internal processes as well as for guest-related services. The team around the CEO`s Christian Andresen and Lutz Hesse saw hotelkit, with its new methods and opportunities, as a way of better implementing this objective. One of the main challenges was to make the existing and effective, but partly still paper-based, processes more modern and efficient for employees. The aim was to speed up internal communication with each employee being directly contactable. In other words, one could quickly expect a significant increase in their everyday efficiency through the digitalisation of processes.

You can see that the creators of hotelkit have come from a hospitality background because they perfectly grasp internal hotel processes and help to simplify their customers’ daily tasks. We are already looking forward to the next developments.

Christian Andresen CEO The Mandala Berlin

Implementation & Trial Phase

In October 2016, The Mandala Berlin decided to conduct a trial together with hotelkit. In order to ensure that hotelkit could be incorporated into employees’ routines right from day one, an extremely structured method of implementation was required. “Together with my team, we decided to carry out repairs, guest requests and all daily communication exclusively using hotelkit, right from day one”, explains Christian Andresen, CEO of The Mandala Berlin. In order to involve everyone from the beginning, the hotel decided to carry out the trial with all 140 employees. This required a good preparation on both sides and a total of 9 training sessions within a time slot of just 2 weeks. The Mandala Berlin now uses hotelkit as a matter of course and it is perfectly integrated into every employee ́s daily routine.

Results

Due to the structured approach during the introductory phase, each employee is now incorporated into the new solution. The Mandala calls hotelkit MICE – Mandala Intelligent Communication. An accurate name, when considering how the tool has optimised internal communication. Everyone is kept up-to-date each day with 4 entries created in the News area. hotelkit is now also an integral part of daily routines. Around 30 tasks are completed daily, whereby 20 tasks include checklists which are systematically processed by the respective staff member. The team now works with a total of 122 individual checklists with new ones regularly being added. The maintenance service, a team of three, receives around 18 new repair requests each day via hotelkit, of which 72% are completed within 24 hours. If there are damage-related queries, these are resolved with the relevant employee directly in hotelkit. Guest services were also digitally optimised within a short space of time.

I was able to restructure processes within the housekeeping team using hotelkit, making life easier for employees here. We can now almost completely do away with telephone calls, so don’t have to disturb colleagues during their working routine.

Franziska Schöler
Franziska Schöler Executive Housekeeper

Out of 17 new daily guest requests, the housekeeping team were able to document 72% of requests as completed within 1 hour. Each room of the hotel is also fitted with an NFC chip, that communicates a wide range of information to employees via contactless data transfer – articles with explanations and videos, open repair requests and inspections due – and also functions as a checkpoint for various rounds. This provides employees with more accurate information which is clearly structured and easier to find.

Julia is specialized in webdesign but also likes to write blog articles from time to time.

About the author

Julia Stiefsohn

Enjoys giving websites an attractive look, this blog also bears her creative handwriting, at least in part. Speaking of handwriting: every now and then, when she’s in the flow, she also writes.

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