How Hospitality Businesses Can Improve Operations With Document Management

Technologies, such as social media and smartphones, are making for savvier guests, who are more confident in making greater demands from the restaurants and hotels they frequent. Word of mouth spreads a lot faster on the internet and through a smartphone-enabled customer base. And if guests don’t like what they see in a traditional hotel market, they can simply find a nearby Airbnb.

Hospitality businesses now need to offer lower, more competitive pricing while also delivering increasingly higher levels of service and amenities. Like a vaccine, the poison is also the medicine: new technology is also enabling hotels to do this.

What follows are several ways you can leverage document management systems (DMSs) to improve customer service and streamline workflows and automation processes, all of which help you lower costs and deliver a better service.

Health and safety compliance

Restaurants and hotels that serve food must comply with regulatory standards to keep their licenses and reputations in good standing. Switching from a paper-based process of recording your compliance and inspection marks can lower loads of staff paid work hours, allowing them to focus that time on delivering exceptional customer service instead. Digital recordkeeping also means there is always a clearly followable audit trail if any old documents or data are ever requested from state or federal regulators.

Daily cleaning tasks, timestamped temperature checks, and more can be completed with handheld devices that send recordings straight to your central DMS, and alerts can be sent out when tasks go uncompleted.

Consistently good service

Hospitality brands are made and lost on a company’s ability to deliver a consistent experience. Much in the way cleaning and safety inspection tasks can be automated and paired with timed alerts, so too can many customer service tasks.

With a large and diverse staff, intuitive smart forms can keep your processes consistent. Smart forms can be set and followed so that every employee cleans a room, sets a table, or greets a guest in the same exact way. Records of each employee’s task checklists can be stored and referenced at any time.

Staff training

Creating digital checklists also makes training new staff more efficient. It’s no secret that staff turnover can be high in the restaurant and hospitality business. Keeping training consistent keeps service delivery consistent.

Even if they aren’t a new hire, employees often have to fill in for one another in roles or on shifts they’re less familiar with. By utilizing digitally monitorable protocols, you can standardize training routines and improve the service quality of your entire business.

Boost productivity

Payroll is undoubtedly one of your biggest expenses. Successful hospitality management means getting the most out of every paid staff hour of work, while also avoiding employee burnout. Employees need to be consistently delivering high-quality service, after all.

From workflow automation to accounting, booking, auditing, facilities maintenance, and supply ordering processes, going from paper to digital records makes everything quicker and easier — and it saves you money. DMS software can even be integrated with customer relationship management systems, so you can quickly process customer data and gain actionable insights into improving the overall service of your hospitality business.

It may look bleak for the hospitality industry at the moment, with the coronavirus restricting travel and the government advising against public gatherings, but this is a temporary blip. On the larger trend line, the industry is growing, with more demand than the current supply can generally handle.

Still, competition is getting more and more fierce. You need every digital advantage available. Your competitive edge starts with PairSoft. Read our free white paper, Top 9 reasons you should move PairSoft to the Cloud, to learn more. Or schedule a free personalized demo with us today to see what PairSoft has to offer your hospitality business.