Case Study:

Planet Hollywood Resort and Casino

The Planet Hollywood Casino and Resort is one of the premier destination properties on the Las Vegas strip. Planet Hollywood boasts 2,344 rooms, 223 suites, several popular restaurants, in-room data ports, a large convention center, more than 4,000 employees and a theater that hosts some of the top names in entertainment.

State-Of-The-Art Call Center Consolidation Technology

The Challenge

Often the first point of contact at any resort is the call center, and many properties operate these independently. Planet Hollywood sought a communications solution to consolidate the multiple types of call processing, and to provide a higher level of guest service with a cross-trained staff.

Planet Hollywood's 70 agents are skilled in handling a multitude of call types from a single workstation position, including internal guest service calls (dial "0" from the guest room or house phone), restaurant and guest room reservations and theater reservations. Planet Hollywood's call center staff is also tasked with responding to calls from staff members of the hotel, and required to dispatch hotel and casino staff through the integrated paging solution with an on-call schedule to support the dispatch.

As with most hotel properties, Planet Hollywood's call center acts like an informational 411 center or a municipal 311 center for guests and staff alike. The dynamic of the property and the great deal of information for each venue requires agents to work from a centralized call center, and have instant access to any and all information on events, restaurant menus, convention schedules and facilities.

The Solution

Planet Hollywood looked to Amcom Software¹ to improve call center efficiencies and maintain brand integrity for ongoing customer loyalty. Amcom provided Planet Hollywood with the Xtend XpressDesk™ solution. XpressDesk is a Windows-based application that gives call center agents visual access to advanced hospitality-specific telephony capabilities. Amcom integrated XpressDesk into the Planet Hollywood's existing Nortel Symposium Call Center Server environment. The hotel had been using Symposium to provide skills-based routing and real-time queue reporting to enhance the efforts of agents and supervisors, while improving overall customer satisfaction and service levels.

The integration of the Amcom Solution with Symposium equips agents with detailed information on callers from guest rooms via a gateway interface to the hotel's property management system (PMS). When a call is received, the extension is recognized and corresponded with the appropriate guest profile in the database. A pop-up screen of the caller's guest profile is immediately displayed on the computer of the call center agent. XpressDesk thereby enables Planet Hollywood's agents to be well prepared to service requests of the hotel's guests.

Amcom implemented several other modules to enhance call center operations: a wakeup application, Xtend Paging Gateway, and Xtend Voice With a Smile^®, which allows callers to be greeted with a customizable, time-of-day sensitive message in the voice of the agent handling the call.

Another challenge Planet Hollywood faced was how to reduce the call volume to the agents by staff so that agents could focus on guest satisfaction. To improve this, Amcom deployed their Xtend WebXchange^® solution. WebXchange is a browser-based end user directory integrated with the XpressDesk system. This module empowers all hotel staff members with the ability to perform directory lookup searches by name, department name, extension number, pager ID or virtually any other database field.

The Result

Working with Amcom Software, Planet Hollywood was able to centralize all property information and make it available to the call center staff via the XpressDesk interface. Since implementing, Planet Hollywood has experienced a noticeable increase in service levels. Callers are now serviced by a staff of agents that are prepared, knowledgeable and ready to meet any and all needs that may arise.

"I couldn't imagine a day in this call center without the use of the XpressDesk system" said Michael Ford, Director of Call Center Operations for Planet Hollywood. "The tools from Amcom Software enable us to operate our call center in the efficient, professional manner our guests expect from Planet Hollywood."

WebXchange has served to significantly reduce the number of dial-zero calls, as the hotel staff now has the ability to retrieve information for themselves. This enables agents to concentrate current and potential guests.

All callers to Planet Hollywood's call center are uniformly greeted with the friendly voice of an agent ready to assist, reinforcing the professional welcome that is synonymous with Planet Hollywood Casino and Resort brand.

¹ Amcom Software acquired Xtend Communications Corp. in November 2007. All mentions of "XpressDesk", "Paging Gateway", "Voice With A Smile" and "WebXchange" have been changed to "Xtend XpressDesk", "Xtend Paging Gateway", "Xtend Voice With A Smile" and "Xtend WebXchange" (respectively) in both copy and quotes.