Marina Mandarin Adopts Technology to Reduce Costs and Enhance Customer Experience

Marina Mandarin Singapore has started using mobile technology to enhance customer experience at their Food & Beverage outlets.

The OneGuest Mobile Solution, comprising the iPad, iPhone and a cloud-based content management system, is fully integrated with the hotel’s point-of-sale system.

The solution has been developed in partnership with SPRING Singapore as part of Marina Mandarin’s Customer-Centric Initiative (CCI), supported by Singapore Hotel Association (SHA), and initiated under the IDA Mobility Solutions Call-for-Collaboration (CFC) in collaboration with the Singapore Tourism Board and Employment and Employability Institute (e2i).

With the tightening of foreign labour supply and manpower crunch, Marina Mandarin was concerned that the overall customer experience might be affected and its staff morale impacted. Leveraging SPRING’s CCI, the hotel worked with the developer of OneGuest Mobile Solutions to customise the three applications (OneGuest Menu, OneGuest Manage and OneGuest Admin) and for the first time, integrate the solution with the hotel’s point-of-sale and back-end systems. The process took six months to complete and the pilot programme was launched on 7 November 2012 at the hotel’s Atrium Lounge where the manpower resources were most affected.

The OneGuest Mobile Solutions is aimed at improving customer satisfaction, providing more customer-centric services and increasing staff productivity.

OneGuest Menu is a digital menu that enables customers to browse and order food & beverage items on the iPads. These orders are seamlessly transmitted to the point-of-sale system in real-time.

The current process of attending to customers up to the order-placing phase requires three trips: the first trip involves showing the customers to their tables, the second trip to pass the customers the menus for their perusal, and the third trip to take their orders when they are ready.

By using OneGuest Menu, the last trip is eliminated which effectively improves the process by 33%. With the time savings, staff can now take care of more tables and orders, spend quality time with customers and be re-deployed to other sections, if required. Customers can also enjoy the convenience of placing their orders, indicating their special requests via the message board and calling for service, through the OneGuest Menu. This reduces the chances of staff taking the wrong orders or keying in the wrong items into the system.

In addition, with the availability of a feedback function on the OneGuest Menu, customers are now able to input their feedback directly. This allows service staff to view the feedback immediately and respond to it on the spot, which improves customer satisfaction. The current process of getting customer feedback is through the comment cards which are collected and routed to the respective departments concerned to review manually. With this, there is a loss of opportunity to address the feedback instantly and hence, a poorer customer engagement.

OneGuest Manage simplifies the allocation of tables, allows staff to key in customers’ orders which are routed to the kitchen directly and alerts staff to customer requests immediately, all done through the use of iPhones.

Using OneGuest Manage, staff can “assign” and “unassign” each iPad to a table, in order to see unoccupied and occupied tables clearly at a glance on their iPhones. With the ability to monitor every table via iPhones, all staff are aware of the status of each table. This reduces the chance of erroneously assigning new customers to an occupied table, where the existing customers might have stepped away for the moment. Each staff is also able to provide customers the status of their orders using their iPhones, without having to refer to the POS terminal. Staff are notified instantly on their iPhones when customers require service, thereby reducing the need for service staff to hover around and wait to be called upon. As this reduces customers’ waiting time and increases the ease of getting service, higher customer satisfaction can be expected.

OneGuest Admin is a cloud-based content management system that allows the easy monitoring of product availability, pricings and demands, for more effective sales and marketing promotions to improve revenue. Service staff are able to view real-time reports to monitor sales, track popular menu items and its inventory, and manage customer expectations.

Updating of menu items on the iPads can be done easily and instantaneously via OneGuest Admin. When compared to traditional paper menus, this increases staff efficiency, saves time and importantly money.

“As the manpower crunch becomes critical in our industry, we are most concerned on its impact on our customers’ experience and our staff’s morale. By harnessing the power of the latest mobile technology, we are able to create an effective solution that addresses both concerns. Providing premium customer experiences has been the cornerstone of Marina Mandarin’s Asian Hospitality credo, while taking care of our staff is the foundation of our core values. Even in challenging times, we want to make sure we do not lose sight of them” said Mr Kurt O. Wehinger, General Manager of Marina Mandarin Singapore.

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