Constance Hotels and Resorts: Established in 1975, Constance Hotels and Resorts is a group of luxury five-star hotels and resorts in the Indian Ocean. Headquartered in Mauritius, the group also operates in the Seychelles, Maldives and Madagascar, with sales offices in in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, and sales representatives across numerous countries.
In the competitive luxury hospitality market, customer loyalty is key—and Constance Hotels and Resorts aimed to deliver consistently excellent experiences as it added new locations. However, as the hotel chain grew it realized its recruiting and training operations were becoming unsustainable. “Our employees are our face to the customer, and to keep our brand promise consistently across all our locations, it’s essential that we give our people the right training, mentorship and resources” said Roshan Koonja. “We have a naturally high turnover of employees, many of whom are working with us for a year between finishing college and starting university. As we opened international hotels and resorts, we needed to fly out to the islands to deliver training sessions, which drove up our costs and reduced our operational efficiency. And with more than 19 different nationalities working at a single resort, it was difficult to optimize our training methodology to account for cultural differences.To communicate its core values to employees and nurture loyalty as it added new locations, Constance Hotels and Resorts needed to ensure that it could collaborate effectively across its global organization—but how?
Constance Hotels and Resorts implemented a social business network with IBM® Connections Cloud™, enabling it to create compelling training and mentoring programs for customer-facing employees. Today, the group uses this network to imbue its workforce with the skills needed to deliver on the brand promise and drive growth.“The vast majority of our new employees are millennials, and they are among the most active users of IBM Connections Cloud,” says Roshan Koonja. “Our new hires are interviewed in their home countries via video calls, and we wanted to enable them to get the most value out of their training by beginning the process even before they arrived to start work. “We have now opened up a wide range of communication channels to train our people, including communities, videos, wikis and more. [...] Our people are better equipped than ever to deliver services that reflect our values, and keep the brand promise.”
Constance Hotels and Resorts is experiencing positive results with its internal staff and with outside contractors. “We have now created a Connections community that provides information on where and when trainees need to check in, their induction schedule and the policies and values of the company. Better still, new employees can ask their peers directly if they are unsure about anything, and get the answers they need straight away. […] The result is that our people are better equipped than ever to deliver services that reflect our values, and keep the brand promise.”By opening up its IBM Connections Cloud platform to external contractors, Constance Hotels and Resorts is bringing new customer-facing services to market faster than ever.“For example, we recently engaged an external vendor to help us develop a kids’ club experience for our resorts. In the past, our consultants would have had to fly between islands to coordinate stakeholder groups. Thanks to IBM Connections Cloud, that’s all changed. Our consultant was able to develop best practices for the experience and build a training program for our employees in under four weeks—70 percent faster than would have been possible with the previous way of working.”
Before
- Costly recruitment and training operations
- Cumbersome training operations that required air travel between locations
- Inefficient internal communication
- Fear that growth would exacerbate above issues
After
- Projects can be completed 70% faster
- Faster, cost-effective onboarding of employees
- Ability to engage with millennial employees (who prefer to use WhatsApp and Facebook to communicate rather than email) in the cloud puts Constance in a strong position to attract the best millennial applicants
- Employees have ability to crowdsource answers to questions
- Open communication via social network enables employees to connect with one another. Creates stronger ties amongst workforce and drives internal innovation.
IBM® Connections™ CloudIBM Domino®IBM Notes® 9 Social EditionIBM Notes TravelerIBM Sametime®IBM Verse™
Constance Hotels and Resorts' approach is unique and transformational because its cloud and hybrid setup accommodates the needs of their customers who want to be remote and undisturbed while on vacation AND the needs of their business which keeps employees and stakeholders connected. Although geographically distributed across the Indian Ocean, Constance Hotels communicates as if in one location. Our new hires are digital natives, more used to using services such as Facebook and WhatsApp to communicate than traditional tools such as email,” says Roshan Koonja. “By embracing a cloud collaboration solution, we are in a strong position to attract the best millennial applicants.”Constance Hotels and Resorts approach to expansion is also unique. Investing in the employee experience as a means to improve the customer experience is much talked about but rarely implemented. Constance understands that its customer-facing workforce is paramount to their success in the hospitality industry. Providing a pleasing experience for employees to train for their jobs and communicate with one another demonstrates to Constance's workforce its dedication to service extends beyond the customer to all areas of the business.
Our social network helps us unleash the hidden potential of our people. For example, our resorts launched a friendly competition to see how many different activities they could launch, and published pictures to the shared Connections community. During this competition, one of our employees started a cooking class, which was a big hit with the kids—and soon, employees at all our resorts started launching their own cooking classes.
