Beyond Phone Calls — The Best VoIP Integrations For Your Hotel

Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) phone systems have been around for decades, and it’s no longer a surprise to find them operating in any large business or hotel. In fact, given recent trends in regulation, technology, and consumer expectations, you’d be more surprised to find a hotel that’s still running an analog phone system.

Even though VoIP systems are now the norm for virtually all businesses, there’s so much more that a VoIP or PBX system can do besides simply handling voice calls over the internet. To truly improve your guest experience, make your hotel more efficient, and empower your staff, you can integrate your VoIP system with dozens of other software tools through the power of Phonesuite. Here are some of the best use cases.

CRM Integration

Think of CRM integration as caller ID taken to its most capable extreme. When a guest calls your hotel for the first time, your CRM can catalog their number, location, and what they called about. If they book a room and express certain preferences for bed size, view, room service, or anything else, all that information is collected into the CRM.

When that same guest re-books next year, you can activate your incredible guest service. Before your front desk staff even picks up the phone, they’ll have all the information they need on the screen in front of them to make the guest’s next stay as personalized and frictionless as possible. 

Unified Communications

Your guests use far more than just their phone to book a room. Some of them might book through your website or a third-party app, some might use email or text messaging, and some might still use a fax.

Until recently, hoteliers found it very difficult to keep track of communications from multiple channels. If a guest books over the phone and then emails to ask about an ocean view, how can you make sure that change is made without manually altering the reservation? Unified communication systems can collect every piece of correspondence into one tool. Better yet, these systems can enable you to send texts, emails, and faxes or make phone calls from within the same system so nothing slips through the cracks.

Click to Dial

Your staff makes hundreds of calls a day, and though the act of typing in a phone number might seem trivial, it can add up. A click-to-dial integration is a simple piece of code that allows your employees to simply click on a phone number on their computer screen, at which point the phone will automatically call out to that number. If your employees are wearing Bluetooth headsets, they don’t even need to use their hands for the phone, leaving them free to look up useful information or take notes. This small increase in productivity will add up significantly over time, resulting in a more efficient and effective workforce.

Analytics Tools

Your hotel fields hundreds of phone calls per day — if you run a chain with multiple locations, that number might be in the thousands. Do you know which location fields the most calls? The average length of a call? Where the calls are coming from? What percentage of calls result in a booking?

All of these data points are potentially extremely useful. With the right analytics tools, you can make your staff more efficient, target your marketing to certain zip codes, make efforts to close deals more efficiently or more quickly, or add service offerings that people keep asking for. Integrating detailed analytics tools into your VoIP system can bring your hotel into the 21st century with authority.