Don’t forget your most important resource… your Team!

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Motivating your team through their working environment is a key way to help drive your customer’s guest experience. In the hospitality industry, it is always vital that we deliver exceptional customer service to reinforce our Brand values and hopefully ensure repeat business. Obviously the look, ambience and technology infrastructure of a venue is key in delivering this, but it is the staff that work at the venue that are paramount in ensuring that your guests stay is a memorable one, for all the right reasons! Valuing and motivating staff comes in many guises; pay, benefits, empowerment, promotional prospects, but working conditions are also key. Ensuring that care is taken over the environment for your staff areas, as well as those for your guests, will help your staff to feel valued and in turn help them to ‘live your Brand’. Improving Back of House Areas using AV Increasingly CGA Integration is seeing savvy employers investing in their staff areas; using AV technology to enhance ‘Back of House.’ Over the years, CGA has installed sound systems and digital signage in staff areas at venues such as The Dorchester, Park Lane and the staff canteen at Hyatt Regency London - The Churchill. We have also worked with partners to install digital signage back of house in hotels, to ensure that their staff arrive and leave work in a pleasant environment and are kept up to speed with staff news and current affairs. Back of House Sound Systems Installing sound systems throughout staff changing areas and back of house areas will help staff to feel relaxed when starting and leaving work. Some venues use soothing music, while others choose local radio stations with news, to ensure that the staff are up to speed with what is happening locally, benefiting both them and in turn your guests. Back of House Digital Signage Gone are the days of paper bulletins to inform staff of important news and key staff events, email has taken over, but at times where your staff might not have access to their mobile phone or computer, digital signage, (a generic term for information disseminated through electronic screens), can be used in staff areas to keep them up to speed. Venues are using this to inform staff of; important corporate news, key employee information and more crucially staff social events and activities, even to wish employees a Happy Birthday! Many employers are very conscientious in differentiating between corporate and staff information to ensure that members of staff feel their events are social occasions. The way digital signage is presented can help with this differentiation. Help your team to live your Brand Creating a back of house environment that is synonymous with your Brand, one which is inclusive to the longest serving and newest arrival alike, will help your staff in turn better deliver your Brand to your customers, selling and upselling products much more effectively than brochures or websites alone. If you think this is an area that your hotel could benefit from then please do get in touch to discuss how AV can be used to empower your most important resource … your team. I look forward to hearing from you. Chris Gunton Managing Director CGA Integration

CGA Integration … Making hospitality sound great!

Delivering Brand consistency across very different venues

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One of the most important issues when dealing with AV is to understand the requirements of a Brand; what experience is the Brand trying to deliver to its customers and how in turn can quality sound help to engage the senses in achieving this experience.  It is then essential that this is delivered across the whole estate, such that wherever a customer is in the world, they know they are experiencing a particular Brand.

Walking across a gravel path, breaking a pane of glass, puffing up a feather pillow, sound is so evocative and can conjuring up such vivid imagery. Blended correctly with creative interior design, superior customer service and exceptional cuisine, sound plays a critical part in delivering the total Brand experience in the hospitality sector.

Audio Brand consistency is not just about using the same musical tracks in every venue.  Undeniably, a carefully selected music playlist combined with a quality sound system is vital in delivering a brand experience, but the physical structure of a venue impacts on the acoustics and subsequently on how that playlist will sound.  As such, audio Brand consistency is more challenging to achieve if venues within a Brand are very different acoustically.  CGA Integration have recently designed and installed the audio for two very acoustically different Dishoom Restaurants; Dishoom King’s Cross and Dishoom Carnaby.  

Although the antithesis of each other acoustically, both of these restaurants need to deliver the same unique buzz and vibe of Dishoom.  Dishoom King’s Cross is a listed building with very high ceilings, multiple levels and hard surfaces, which creates a very harsh acoustic environment.  Dishoom Carnaby however has low ceilings, smaller rooms and more soft furnishings.  Sound behaves very differently in these contrasting environments, but by using carefully placed ceiling speakers and the same brand of digital sound processor, each Dishoom restaurant feels and sounds fantastic, delivering a great Brand experience across both venues.

Using the same wall mounted controls in each venue, programmed using a similar configuration, has the additional benefit of staff familiarisation; making it easier for staff to transition between venues in a Brand with multiple sites.

There is so much we can do with sound. By investing in carefully placed speakers, a good quality music source and good quality audio content, the whole hospitality experience can be greatly enhanced and Brand values can be delivered through a common audio footprint whatever the venue.

How Pharmaceutical Technology can deliver a most Memorable Customer Experience

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Likening your hotel guests to animals in pharmaceutical drugs trials might be the furthest analogy from your mind and yet systems originally designed to monitor exactly this have now been developed to help hospitality venues offer both a memorable customer experience and provide unrivalled security for their guests.

Imagine if you had the ability to monitor how guest’s behaviour changed if you changed room layout, décor or elements of customer service?  Imagine if a returning customer could be welcomed back by name without any visible technology? Imagine if the path of a bag snatch thief could be tracked throughout your venue and beyond to aid their capture?  All of these and more are now possible using image analysis.

CGA Integration are currently working with i-Abra, a high performance computing company, who have developed image analysis systems to deliver the next generation in guest behaviour monitoring and security.

At its simplest, image analysis, when integrated into existing CCTV systems, can count guests by recognising unique faces, assess dwell time and monitor activity such that you can look at how guest behaviour alters when you change; room layouts, decor, or elements of customer service, or when you tweak promotional materials and displays.  

With more detailed analysis, this tool allows you to identify and zone guest demographics within different areas of your venue, recognise individual guests and spot behaviour patterns, enabling you to gain a fuller understanding of your customers and see how environmental changes affect behaviour within different groups.  

Taken to its full potential, this system recognises individual faces and allows you to match them to your known client base, this is done in real time with matching achieved in a fraction of one second, enabling you to welcome back a returning guest and also monitor less welcome individuals!

From a security perspective, facial recognition from image analysis allows the tracking of a person of interest throughout a venue to see where they have been and where they are now.  This aids both staff to apprehend the individual and the identification of areas where security upgrades are needed to reduce any problem hot spots.

Suddenly your guest’s faces become like Internet cookies and you are able to identify where they are, where they have been, how long they stayed where and if they returned.  If information is power, image analysis systems give you the power to understand your guests and reward them with a most memorable customer experience, every time they visit. 

For more information on how Facial Recognition systems could work in your venue please contact CGA Integration on (0845) 058 46 50 or email info@cga-integration.co.uk