Thin Client

Source Link on Hotel Interactive

Friday, December 05, 2008
Glenn Haussman

Hilton Hotels Corporation

Hotel companies are always looking for creative ways to reduce expenses. It’s a mantra that most industry experts are espousing now that the lodging business is backing off several years of record high profits.

But cutting expenses for the sake of cutting expenses is not a good thing when it comes at the expense of service. Russ Olivier, SVP of Reservations and Customer Care with Hilton Hotels Corporation, believes he’s figured out a way to significantly reduce expenses in his department by encouraging his employees to stay at home. It’s a win-win for Hilton.

That’s right. By getting reservation agents to work from home, employee productivity is up, sales have increased and Olivier is looking to expand the 18-month-old program. Dubbed Hilton@Home, the program enables those who desire the flexibility to work at home the ability to choose their own hours from an available pool of hours, working from the comfort of their own surroundings. Employees are happier, turnover is down and Olivier is seeing great results.

His department handles all reservations and customer care inquiries for all nine Hilton Family brands and employs 3,000 team members located in nine centers - spread throughout the world in places such as Texas, Pennsylvania, Glasgow, Mexico City, Singapore, Cairo and Tokyo - that answer 36 million phone calls annually. Currently, 900 of those agents are working from home. The program has been so successful that Olivier expects that number to top 1,900 by the end of 2009.

“We recognized several years ago that hiring talent for these types of jobs was going to get harder and harder,” Olivier said. “We knew we had to tap new and different labor pools to keep our team growing because of Hilton-brand expansion globally.”

Olivier also knows the cold hard reality of the true expense of hiring a new employee. Not only do they need to be paid, but they need to work in an office. And building new facilities can prove to be quite a costly endeavor. Enter the concept of working from home.

Other travel-related companies are doing it too, and also to great success. The poster child for this way of handling customer calls is Jet Blue, the low-cost carrier that has seen wild success since its inception back in 2000. According to former Jet Blue CEO David Neeleman, once the program was in place, productivity shot up 25 percent, turnover plummeted and customer service call satisfaction rose. Now, all of its reservation agents are working at home.

Hilton started their program in Tampa, where a reservation facility was based but space was scare. As an experiment, they gave the program a shot to see how it would work out.

“We couldn’t believe the response. There was a huge line outside the door the first time we advertised. And it was a whole different labor force of people that wanted flexible hours but didn’t want to have to come into an office,” said Olivier.

Soon Olivier amassed a workforce of stay-at-home moms, retired professionals and those looking for a second job. “Hilton@Home workers tend to be a higher quality labor force than those just starting with us. We see higher customer satisfaction call scores for agents working from home. There is a correlation here.”

That first group of 100 led to more Hilton@Home hires, and now the company is hardly doing any hiring for on-site staff at all.

“It’s really become a cornerstone of growth for us with the idea we won’t necessarily need these large facilities anymore,” said Olivier.

The 900 employees currently in the program are about the equivalent to 500 full-time employees. If they were located on site, they’d require about 25,000 square feet of office space, not to mention the costs involved with keeping the lights on and other office-related expenses.

They’ve each been issued a thin client device from which to work. They plug it into a high-speed internet connection and voila!...all the technology is present as if they were in an office surrounded by colleagues.

Employees can essentially select the hours they want to work in half-hour increments. They pick their schedule weekly, and it never has to be the same. That means mom or dad can sneak out to see their kid’s soccer game. Or if they have an hour or so in the middle of the day to fill, they can earn some extra income. Workers also don’t need to spend time commuting or on gas. And of course they work in their pajamas if they’re so inclined.

“This is the wave of the future for a lot of these types of jobs that are currently strapped to allocation when they don’t need to be,” said Olivier.