Previous challenges…
The system that was previously in place at Nordic Choice hotels had a number of limitations that hampered the company’s ability to offer the standard of customer service they aimed for. Some of the problems they faced were:
- Lack of support for promotions and offers, so they were hard to manage;
- Difficult and imprecise management of the general ledger. For example, it was hard to calculate liqueur tax across the chain;
- Time-consuming setups: each hotel had to be set up singularly, a hard feat considering the scope of the operations;
- Lack of standardization between hotels: the same item might be assigned a different code between hotels, making it impossible for the company to achieve effective reporting and data analysis.
…and current solutions
Most of these problems now belong to the past. The company, with the help of local LS Retail partner Cenium AS, implemented LS Central for hotels, an efficient and tailored software solution that they are currently using in almost all of the 170 hotels of the chain. LS Central for hotels is also deployed in all the new hotels that Nordic Choice opens. LS Central for hotels brought various benefits to the company:
- The software setup time per hotel has decreased considerably, going from 2 days to just a few minutes;
- All hotels share the same template, making implementation easy and fast;
- Promotions and offers can be easily managed, improving overall customer service and increasing loyalty;
- The chain has achieved greater efficiency by standardizing items between hotels. This translates into more accurate statistics and faster and more effective management;
- The new data director works much better. Now items, prices, and staffing on more than 2000 POS can be easily managed from the central office, ensuring the company that they have total control over their whole operation from headquarters;
- Although they all use the same system, the sub-chains utilize different interfaces, tailored to the needs of their specific customers.
Looking towards the future
Nordic Choice is committed to offering an outstanding experience to guest and therefore strives to respond swiftly and precisely to its customers’ needs and demands. In this spirit, Nordic Choice challenges LS Retail to make their product even more extensive, so that they can provide an even superior level of service. Nordic Choice’s demands to LS Retail revolve around:
- Sustainability tools, so that the company can use the software solution to manage their sustainability program, “we care”;
- A software solution to offer self-service check-in, an option that many guests appreciate and request;
- Further tools focused on increasing guest experience, from order to payment.
At LS Retail we believe that no product is so good that it cannot be improved, and we are always happy to take on new challenges. We thank Nordic Choice for the insights into their business’s necessities, and we will put them high on our list when deciding on new directions for our product development.
