Business Context/Key Business Drivers
Hilton Hotels is one the biggest lodging company worldwide and has been recently acquired by Blackstone Group. In 2007 Hilton’s portfolio characteristics are:
• close to 3,000 hotels between all its brands;
• Properties can be: a) directly owned; b) managed; c) franchised. The latter is the most common solution;
• covers almost the possible spectrum of lodging.
The IT function is considered part of the core business and the IT is considered as a source to increase revenues instead of a merely cost function.
Hilton’s CIO developed OnQ platform to manage all the information flows inside the organization in order to serve the customers. In particular OnQ is:
• a custom built Enterprise System;
• required consistent investments (close to 200 Millions $) and a considerable maintenance cost (60 Millions/year);
• kept in house because Hilton believes its capabilities generate a competitive advantage.
One of the applications supported by OnQ is the CRM program that manage all the information and preferences of Hilton’s customers.
Initiative Objectives/Benefits
OnQ and CRM were implemented to :
• standardize the service level in all the hotels in the different brands;
• provide a holistic view of the customers;
• track and make easily available information about the customer’s preferences in order to enhance the service level through:
o personalization;
o recognition;
o service recovery;
o customer analytics;
o timely feedback of serice levels (SALT).
• Increase ROI in Call Center’s operations (reduce average single call time);
• Improve efficiency in staffing through pre assignments;
• Enable Hilton to open hotels at quick pace.
Initiative challenges
The key challenge Hilton faced to achieve its goals was the local implementations that could have affected the service delivery because of:
• human factor due to: