rocky mountain ski lodge
Esnatech unified messaging rescues a ski season [view pdf]
The problem: A "communications avalanche"
They come like pilgrims to a shrine, weaving their way through piles of the latest high-tech ski equipment in the hotel lobby, crowding and jostling their way to the front desk. “Welcome to the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge,” says the sign, promising an unforgettable skiing experience and spectacular mountain views. For the past twenty years, more than ten thousand eager skiers and sightseers from around the world annually make
their way to this 80-room resort hotel, sited in the heart of the Canadian Rockies at Canmore, Alberta. Guests hope to “get away from it all” by coming to the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge, but the reality is those guests also demand modern communications links with the working world they are escaping. The hotel’s communications system groans under a daily avalanche of phone calls, messages, faxes, and e-mails that would bury an average business, but the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge stays on top of it all with the latest information technology, advanced phone systems—and the personal touch.
“We believe that the best business involves personal service, making sure that a human is available to speak to someone on the phone,” says Dany Stadtmueller, Assistant Manager at Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge. “But if nobody is available to answer the phone personally, the next best thing is unified messaging technology.” Busy hotel staffers appreciate this kind of backup when business gets busy, because nothing is faster and
easier to use than “visual messaging” on a PC. When searching for a fresh communications solution, Stadtmueller was told that the best unified messaging solutions offer visual call control and visual mailbox management integrated into a single solution, delivering complete message management for all media types, and providing access to any message, anytime, anywhere, from any device. But who offers such a solution, especially at an affordable price?
Stadtmueller says that repeat customers are the key to success in the hospitality business, and that means satisfying the immediate information needs of both hotel guests, and potential customers seeking information or a room reservation. “If you don’t, the customer will likely wander off to the competition,” says Stadtmueller. “We needed unified messaging technology that would permit us to do more with less people.” Stadtmueller had to act quickly, because the busy Christmas holiday season was fast approaching, and the cantankerous communications system at the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge wasn’t up to the task of keeping their guests connected—and happy
The challenge: fix everything - within two months!
Stadtmueller contracted Total Communication Services of Calgary, Alberta to overhaul the hotel’s property management system (PMS), voice mail system, and telephone system. The challenge: fix everything within two months, and guarantee that it would reliably work even under the “communications avalanche” of the holiday rush. A complication: Rocky Mountain’s three dissimilar systems were adapted to work together years ago, but age and obsolete technology made them too difficult to support. “Every time there was a problem with the old system, new software had to be written to fix it,” says Brent Schille of Total Communication Services. “In fact, there was only one person who knew how to work on the old MS-DOS-based voicemail system. If that programmer was not available, Rocky Mountain was out of luck.”
Total Communication Services opted to retain Rocky Mountain ’s phone system, but to replace the ancient voicemail system with the latest unified communications solutions developed by Esna Technologies of Markham, Ontario. Schille says Esnatech was a natural choice for the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge because their unified messaging solution seamlessly integrates telephone networks, data networks, and wireless networks into a single connected environment that anybody can use. It’s “future-friendly, too. Beyond traditional voice, fax and email messaging, an Esnatech unified messaging network also integrates with new methods of communication: voice over IP (VoIP), instant messaging, and newer, and new, yet-to-emerge collaborative technologies.
A new property management system selected for the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge promised interface links help the integration effort, but the project depended on Esnatech’s developers to ensure their unified messaging solution would bring it all together. “After we had worked out a common solution to integrate the three platforms, all that remained was developing a single piece of software to coordinate their efforts,” says Schille. But time was short, and the clock was ticking.
"Peeling the Onion"
“It all had to be done before the guests started pouring in for the holiday ski season, says Schille. “We worried about the time factor, but we were confident that we could do it.” Total Communication Services has a long history of implementing solutions that haven’t been attempted before: the first to apply free-space optical lasers for extending telephone systems, and the first to integrate many communication systems that seemed to defy all efforts. With the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge project, their confidence came from extensive experience with Esnatech’s Telephony Office-LinX 2000 unified messaging solution. They knew what the Esnatech solution could do. More importantly, they knew what Esnatech’s developers would do to make it work for the customer.
“Esnatech is one of the only vendors that would entertain this kind of development,” says Total Communication Services’ Schille. “Most other vendors would consider this level of custom development only for a ‘deep pockets’ customer willing to spend vast amounts of money. Esnatech simply said to us: ‘Yes, we can do this’. That has always been the hallmark of their products and services.” The toughest aspect of the project was that all testing had to be done on-site because there was no way to replicate Rocky Mountain ’s setup in a lab. None of the components had ever been installed as part of the same system, so there were many three-way conference calls.
“It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion,” says Schille. When solving the most apparent challenges to the overall integration, Schille claims you often find minor issues hidden underneath. “You must patiently ‘peel back’ the issues, layer by layer, until you’re done,” says Schille. This problem-solving method does take time—and time was in short supply for this project. But Total Communication Services had the best technology, lots of experience, and plenty of determination.
Success and deep satisfaction
“We were determined that it was going to work, and it was going to work the way Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge wanted it to work,” says Schille. By the time the first guests were arriving for their Christmas ski holiday, all three components were installed, tested, and providing the level of customer service that makes the hotel so special. “The results were worth it,” says Rocky Mountain ’s Stadtmueller. “We got what we wanted.” Today, Rocky Mountain has a central mailbox to record and store all incoming messages and inquiries, but sorting them to enable hotel staffers to properly respond to each in a timely manner. A separate messaging mailbox is available for each hotel guest, capable of storing all personal voice messages. Best of all, Rocky Mountain has plenty of system capacity, power, and flexibility to easily handle any future expansion. “It's really good,” says Stadtmueller, “And I’m very satisfied with Esnatech’s solution. It’s been working very reliably since it was installed.”
Lessons learned? Both Stadtmueller and Schille agree: custom development always takes a bit more time than expected, but the key is remaining committed to the project goals, and remaining committed to producing a stable solution for a happy customer. Schille credits Esnatech as a major factor in the project’s success because of the level of support they received from Esnatech when the crunch was on. “The significant thing is what they were willing to attempt to do,” says Schille, who believes that Esnatech’s edge is offering technical and developmental support that is very open to new ideas and different applications. “Many vendors simply will not make that attempt, but Esnatech is always willing to go the extra mile.”
“I think we hit the mark,” says Schille, “The proof is we successfully installed an identical solution to another hotel, and it is also working perfectly.” Further proof is that Total Communication Services has received very few ‘trouble calls’ from the Rocky Mountain Ski Lodge since the installation was completed. Schille claims a success like the Rocky Mountain project builds his team’s confidence to tackle even more complex or difficult projects. “It's like skiing on a difficult slope; it always seems more difficult because you're the first one, or the only one to try it. But there is a deep satisfaction to being the first one to actually do it."