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more . Apps designed by the company are not used by the guests ; instead , they have interfaces with other companies and apps which provide live chat with guests .
“ Features like operations management and shift genius focus on improving operational flexibility and efficiency through smarter , more reliable communication across departments ,” said Karie Kelly , VP of product management for Unifocus . “ To be nimble , real-time collaboration works best for staff and guests through mobile devices . Consequently , we continue to invest in and enhance our guest communications and staff collaboration capabilities across our workforce management and operations platform .”
Unifocus ’ tech offering helps maintain communication between departments through task management checklists , alerts and updates , which can be directly pushed to departments based on their needs and priorities . In practice , housekeeping can flag rooms to be addressed for maintenance concerns , sending an alert directly to the maintenance department on the same application .
This lets the hotel promptly update every department on priority tasks , including guest requests and other support needs . Staff can also directly message one another using the built-in messaging feature , Kelly said .
“ Improving on-property communication and transfer of information creates efficiencies for hotel workers ,” she said . “ Productivity is significantly improved when staff receive prioritized tasks directly on their mobile devices . By optimizing housekeeping , guest services and maintenance tasks , managers can execute 100 % of the work with 75 % of the staff .”
Unifocus ’ Shift Genius feature simplifies the conversations around staff availability , preferences , shift swapping and picking up open shifts — all from a mobile device . Staff availability input can be combined with occupancy data , allowing managers to build schedules without over or understaffing . This system also helps balance a hotels ’ workload and assists in forming critical staffing budgets .
Beekeeper is another platform that solves the disconnect between frontline workers and their managers in the retail , hospitality , manufacturing and construction industries .
Beekeeper ’ s frontline success system is a comprehensive platform that enables twoway , multi-level communication between all departments in an organization . The social media-inspired user interface encourages adoption among frontline employees . Advanced operational tools streamline processes for shift leads and managers , and analytics dashboards provide high-level insights into workforce engagement for executives .
Beekeeper ’ s operational suite is meant to reduce workload , streamline repetitive tasks and processes and speed up productivity in several ways . The company provides multiple communication channel options
Cris Grossman , CEO and founder , Beekeeper
through features like chats , campaigns and streams , which are open-messaging walls where users can create posts . While the visibility of posts can be customized , stream posts can be open to anyone in the company or restricted to certain groups .
Chats offer instant messaging , where users can interact with individual colleagues in real-time or create a group chat to collaborate with co-workers for a specific project .
Campaigns , meanwhile , help send critical information and updates to a bigger audience . Admins can create campaigns to send targeted messages to a broad customized audience and track who ’ s received the campaign .
“ Our customers frequently leverage this feature to send important reminders about open enrolment , health and safety policies and more ,” said Cris Grossman , CEO and founder of Beekeeper . “ What ’ s more , with Instant Inline Translation , users can easily translate all content into their preferred language to ensure everyone understands the message .”
The technological solutions used at Charlestowne Hotels incorporates employee scheduling and time tracking software to optimize staff deployment , track work hours and manage time-off requests .
May 2023 hotelsmag . com 55