Customer Profile – QT Melbourne
The fashion forward QT Melbourne is an artisan playground where lovers of the high life come to satisfy their thirst for all things edgy and innovative. Perfectly groomed and immaculately accessorised QT Melbourne shimmers within the high-end fashion district of Australia’s most creatively charged city. Euro bistro influences pepper a broad menu at Pascale Bar & Grill, high flyers set the night alight in the QT Rooftop Bar, the late night crew unwind and take the edge off at Hot Sauce Laneway Bar and well-heeled fashionistas treat themselves to delicacies at The Cake Shop. This is Melbourne’s new travel muse.
Providing five-star service and accommodation is an undertaking that requires attention to every detail. Guest room phones are no exception. For QT Melbourne that meant finding a guest room phone with the right look and features and a key component being minimalist.
Challenge
Befitting with the style and touch of quirkiness that is QT, they were looking for a phone that was different. A phone that was sleek, sexy but at the same time minimalist. That’s a pretty tall order for a hotel telephone.
Solution
Using a bit of out of the box thinking, they took a VTech cordless SIP phone and hid the not so chic base, just leaving the guest with a sleek, sexy and minimalist cordless handset in a stand-up charging cradle. In line with QT style they wanted the two speed dials on the handset to simply say ‘Feed Me’ and ‘Help Me’. Not a problem.
But……not everything went without a hitch, that very rarely happens in life or hotels. Brendon Granger from Technology 4 Hotels says
“To be honest, I literally lost sleep over this.”
“I believe the most important thing is how you handle the issue. I worked closely with Craig Simpson from Event Hospitality & Entertainment and VTech to resolve the issue with a far superior outcome than initially expected.”
Brendon explains; “During the pre-opening trial sleep overs by staff, it was discovered that the cordless handsets were not as intuitive to use as they should be. They were no different to your cordless handset at home; that is, in order to ‘open the line’; you need to press the ‘talk’ button. However, unlike home, you are presented with a simple pre-set that says ‘Help Me’ so people reasonably expected that they only needed to press the ‘Help Me button. Some staff actually thought the phones were not yet commissioned.”
Brendon and the staff at Technology 4 Hotels were made well aware of how seriously Craig Simpson and other senior staff from Event Hospitality and Entertainment viewed the matter. With only weeks before opening, the pressure was on.
“I could see where the hotel guest was coming from but also technically, I could appreciate the need to ‘open the line’ on a cordless phone. Working with VTech we were able to highlight the problem and had a solution in less than two weeks. The solution was ‘OneTouch’ speed dials. So now the guest just picks up the phone and presses ‘Help Me’ or ‘Feed Me’ and they are immediately connected to hotel staff. Now that’s intuitive.”
Needless to say, Craig Simpson and other senior staff from Event Hospitality and Entertainment were pleased and relieved. They were pleasantly surprised when Brendon offered to work directly with the PABX supplier to implement the necessary upgrade ASAP. Craig and the team had plenty of other things to be addressing associated with the opening of QT Melbourne.
Despite the sleepless nights, Brendon really enjoyed the project, he goes on to tell us why; “We loved working with the team at QT. Like us, they are passionate about delivering the best end result to their guests and they are prepared to invest in achieving this. The best example of this was the determination to have the buttons on the VTech handsets customised specifically for them.”