When Tracey Reed was an executive housekeeper at the Sofitel Brisbane in Australia, the hotel’s general manager asked her opinion about whether to adopt OPTii to help manage her crew.
“What for?” she said. “We’re already running really well. We have all our procedures in place and everything is working fine.”
Tracey’s reluctance to support the general manager’s idea of implementing a new housekeeping management software solution carried the day. The hotel continued plodding along as they had since the hotel’s opening – with paper and pencil.
“Looking back, I guess I was a bit-old fashioned about it at the time,” Tracey says.
Later, she was transferred to the Crowne Plaza Terrigal. This time, Tracey didn’t have a choice in the matter. The hotel’s management had decided to deploy OPTii. She now had to learn how to use it – and discovered what the solution could do in terms of streamlining housekeeping workflow and improving the overall guest experience.
“OPTii converted me completely,” she says. “Once I saw what it could do – the ability to locate a team member at any moment and how it easy it was to increase productivity overall – I was converted.”
Room attendants also enjoy working with OPTii, once they get the hang of it, which typically happens quickly, Tracey says. “It helps them in their day by clearly defining room assignments and setting highly specific, measurable, and attainable goals. When a job is well done, OPTii creates a visible record they can point to as proof of their good performance.”
Supervisors, too, are more accountable in the checking of rooms with OPTii, Tracey says, Optii guides them from room to room, which means the rooms are made ready quicker.
Guests are the final judges and juries of how well the housekeeping staff do their job every day and with OPTii, the guest satisfaction scores have been going up, Tracey says, “And that’s always a good thing for housekeeping and the whole hotel.”
One of OPTii’s greatest benefits, according to Tracey, stems from its extremely useful reporting capabilities. “My favorites are the Training Needs Analysis Report and the Room Attendant Benchmark Report,” she says. “With these you can quickly see the main areas where more training is needed. They also provide extremely valuable data when doing staff reviews.”
Tracey’s conversion from skeptic to believer recently took a step even further when she joined OPTii as a Client Success Manager, traveling from one customer location to the next, ensuring each one enjoys the maximum benefits in quality and efficiency the solution has to offer.
You might say Tracey has seen the light. Now, she spends her day spreading the word, taking satisfaction in seeing her clients cut loose from clumsy old clipboards and set free by the power of OPTii.
“Do I have a message for other Execs out there? Absolutely. Don’t be afraid of change, because OPTii actually allows you to meet your targets far easier and quicker.”
