It’s difficult to overestimate the value of unified communications in today’s evolving landscape. According to IDC, the global UC&C market grew at a rate of 29.2% from 2020 to 2021, and other reports show the market will expand to a value of $385.21 billion by 2030.
In all industries, UC promises opportunities for better productivity, efficiency, cost savings, and business performance. In the hospitality and hotel management space, UC can even power better interactions between companies and their guests, while ensuring businesses remain agile in a challenging, and changing landscape.
With UC in hospitality, companies can integrate communication systems across a range of environments, boosting collaboration, strengthening service standardization, and accessing useful insights every step of the way. Let’s explore the state of UC in hospitality for 2022 and beyond.
The Growing Demand for UC in Hospitality
Communication is critical to success in the hospitality industry. Excellent communication between team members and customers ensures brands can stay one step ahead of the competition. Just as it’s important for teams in the hospitality industry to communicate quickly, and transparently with their clients, it’s also essential to keep teams connected too.
UC helps to fulfil a hospitality company’s unique needs when it comes to keeping environments as streamlined and efficient as possible. Some of the major areas where UC can have the biggest impact on hospitality companies include:
- Service standardisation: For a hospitality brand to maintain high levels of customer satisfaction, it’s crucial for the business to offer a consistent level of excellent service and support from one location to the next. Unified Communications can lead to a more consistent experience throughout the hospitality landscape by ensuring every employee has access to the same aligned tools, information, and technology.
- Improved collaboration: Every employee within a hospitality business needs to be on the same page to ensure the company achieves the right outcomes. Collaboration tools built into the UC environment can help to facilitate collaboration between everyone from front-desk employees to backend managers and supervisors. UCaaS and technology in the cloud can even help to ensure team members on the floor can stay up-to-date with the latest announcements and tasks they need to consider in any environment.
- Better business management: Aligned communication tools aren’t just useful for the employees in a hospitality landscape. These tools can also be vital for business leaders, IT administrators, and team leaders too. IT team leaders don’t have to work as hard to keep track of all the diverse parts of a hospitality team if they can track multiple communication environments in the same space. This can also lead to higher levels of compliance and security – crucial when dealing with personal customer details.
- Enhanced insights: To stay one step ahead of the competition and generate positive reviews from customers, hospitality companies need to keep a close eye on trends and statistics. By aligning a number of communication tools into a single environment, companies can access more extensive insights into the end-to-end customer journey. It’s also possible for business leaders to keep a close eye on productivity and performance among teams.
The Trends Driving UC for Hospitality
For a number of years now, unified communications environments have been demonstrating a number of significant benefits for hospitality brands. In a fast-paced environment like hospitality, UC can ensure silos in information and communication don’t get in the way of business performance.
As the hospitality landscape continues to evolve in the wake of the pandemic, there are also a number of trends helping to generate more attention for the UC and UCaaS space. Some of the most significant trends affecting UC in hospitality include:
- The evolution of the cloud: Like many companies, hospitality brands are rapidly embracing the cloud as a way of unifying teams, technologies, and insights. UCaaS environments offer an excellent way to keep desk, hybrid, and field-based employees connected in the same environment. At the same time, these tools ensure companies can easily leverage new modes of communication as and when they need to. Collaborative tools like Microsoft Teams even come with a host of apps and add-ons specifically for hospitality.
- AI and smart tools: Artificial intelligence can be a powerful addition to the UCaaS landscape for scaling companies in the hospitality space. The right tools can help with everything from automating check-in and check-out procedures, to helping users track down useful information about a client in an instant. AI tools can even provide insights into hospitality business trends, to help companies prepare for changes in demand.
- XR and the Metaverse: The hospitality industry has begun to embrace a wide range of new technologies in the post-pandemic era, to improve customer experiences and increase bookings or sales. As concepts like the metaverse grow more popular, and XR technology becomes more accessible, we’ll see more of these innovations in the UC space. In the future, UC tools could even help team members to manage Virtual Reality hotel tours.
- 5G and IoT: Aside from XR and artificial intelligence, one of the other disruptive technologies influencing hospitality and the UC space right now is 5G. The rise of 5G will make it much easier for employees working in a constantly mobile environment in hospitality to stay connected to the rest of the teams. IoT devices connected with 54G could even allow users to instantly track a service request from a client down to a specific room in a hotel.
With the rise of remote and hybrid work opportunities, UC can even allow back-end members of staff to manage everything from bookings to customer service without leaving home.
Discovering the Opportunities for UC in Hospitality
Driven by increasing demand for better customer experiences, stronger employee collaboration, and improved productivity, investment in UC solutions is rapidly increasing in hospitality. As the industry continues to evolve and customer expectations change in a post-pandemic environment, we’re likely to see more new and exciting innovations in the UC space.
UC solutions will allow hospitality companies to not just improve the connections between their team members, but unlock opportunities for better customer experience and growth too. No hospitality brand can afford to overlook the importance of UC.
