Rajesh Chopra, Senior VP – Information Technology - The Oberoi Group
By MYBRANDBOOK
‘Our first priority is always to enhance guest experience through technology’
Commitment as a Tech Head
As a Tech Head, I have to ensure that the technology deployed should be relevant to the business. Before moving to a new technology, we try to understand its benefit it brings to our business. Technology is always looked from perspective what business needs and not what the vendor offers. Secondly IT has to be sustainable and at the same time deployable across units. It should also justify ROI in the financial terms, besides enhancing customer experience and increasing the productivity of the employees.
Our first priority always is to enhance the guest experience, because this is entirely from where our bread and butter comes from. What differentiates the Oberoi Group Hotel from any other Hotel chain is the kind of personalized service we provide to guests. The focus is on bringing better technologies into the Rooms, to enhance the guest experience. So we first started with In-Room check-in systems, before moving into in-room tablets and now we are enhancing our technology further so that whenever a guest comes to stay with us, even when she is not at the hotel she can still be in touch with us all the time. It can be as simple as getting the hotel car prepared while S/he is still in a meeting, ordering food or booking the spa and so on.
We are also trying to create technology where we can save power and energy. The second largest cost the hotel industry faces is power and so we plan to implement IoT-enabled systems to save power. The third area where we are bringing technology is in the area of analytics where we can understand our guest better, even before he/she comes to our hotel by looking at his/her social behavior, past experience with our hotel or our competitor hotels, going through the reviews she has posted on social media and so on.
Experience Cell
If you adopt an in-sourcing model, getting a technical skillset and retaining it is always a challenge. Especially since our hotels are located in remote areas, getting good talent and people is a big challenge. But if you are adopting an outsourcing model, you are not just outsourcing technology but also people, so things get managed well then.
In the last few years we have standardized business processes across our units. We are not on AI or machine learning yet, but we have centralized our systems in such a way that deploying a new technology resolves our problem in a much better way. So adaptability has never been a challenge on the business side, but the challenge today is for how long or how best you can stay with the technology.
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