News Briefs

Mews, the industry-leading hospitality cloud, has unveiled its next-generation kiosk solution for hotels. The Kiosk can be used for check-in and check-out, by guests or by staff.

“What makes the Mews Kiosk special is that it isn’t only designed for a smooth guest experience,” said Matt Welle, CEO of Mews. “We’ve completely overhauled its user interface and it’s driving phenomenal improvements in check-ins and outs. It’s now easier to find bookings, offer early check-in options and upsell services and products to guests, making a tangible difference to bottom lines and staff productivity.”

The new Kiosk has been optimized for speed, both in terms of its build and functionality, and enables hotels to upsell products and services during the check-in process. Used in economy, midscale and luxury properties around the world, guests have the choice to check-in however they want. Guests can search for their reservation using their last name only using Mews Kiosk, and easily cut their own room keys by following the clear on-screen guidance.

This has contributed to an average check-in time of just over two minutes, a minute faster than previously. For properties using the new Mews Kiosk, the proportion of guests using it to check in has risen, with some hotels seeing kiosk usage increase by over 100%.

Hotels will also benefit from a more cohesive branding and opportunities to boost revenue. For instance, properties can curate their Kiosk imagery, making a more engaging guest experience. A customizable screensaver allows hotels to play branded videos when the kiosks aren’t in use, which lets hotels promote additional services and upgrades. These upsells can be purchased during the kiosk check-in process.

When combined with Mews Terminals, a fully automated, integrated card reader, hotels remove the manual processing of card payments, reducing human error and duplicate billing. Mews customers save an average of six hours per month using Mews Terminals and have seen a 19% higher success rate of payments.

If a guest arrives before check-in time, they can still use the kiosk and – if there is a room available – choose to check in early. This is a huge revenue earner for hotels, and because payment can be made directly via the kiosk, there is no time drain for front desk staff. One hotel in the heart of London generated over €19,000 through early kiosk check-ins in just six weeks.

Postillion Hotels

Mews Kiosk is used by Postillion Hotels in the Netherlands, where they’ve seen a 36% reduction in the time taken for guests to check-in to its hotels, with average check-in taking just over two minutes.

“The Mews Kiosk has improved our check in process tremendously. I don’t see the Kiosks as a replacement of our staff, instead it’s an added benefit. The features offered in the new version fit perfectly with our guest needs. We can now offer extra products, like an early check-in without any hassle, but with extra revenue.” commented Manon Klop, Revenue Manager at Postillion Hotels Nederland, “From a branding standpoint, we oversee the images being displayed and making sure everything the guest sees during check-in matches our standards. For us it is also important that the improvements allow us to keep up with guests’ changing demands.”

Hotel Maashof

Another Mews customer, Hotel Maashof in the city center of Venlo in The Netherlands, has seen 60% faster check-ins because of Mews Kiosk.

Maurice Martens, Head of Marketing at Hotel Maashof, commented, “The front desk team are very happy with Mews Kiosk because they no longer have to print out documents and manually type in all the guest details into the computer. They can focus on the guest instead.”

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced new generative AI capabilities in Amazon Connect, AWS’s cloud contact center that enables organizations of all sizes to deliver better customer experiences at lower cost. Powered by large language models (LLMs) and other foundation models (FMs) available through Amazon Bedrock, the latest Amazon Connect enhancements include new generative AI capabilities that expand on the service’s existing machine learning (ML) features to transform how companies provide customer service. Amazon Q in Connect—a generative AI-enhanced evolution of Amazon Connect Wisdom—provides agents with recommended responses and actions based on real-time customer questions, for faster and more accurate customer support. Amazon Connect Contact Lens—an Amazon Connect feature that provides real-time contact center analytics and quality management—now helps identify the essential parts of call-center conversations with AI generated summaries that detect sentiment, trends, and policy compliance. Also powered by generative AI, Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect today enables contact center administrators to create new chatbots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems in hours by using natural-language prompts, and improve existing systems by generating responses to commonly asked questions. Lastly, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles—an Amazon Connect feature that enables agents to deliver faster, more personalized customer service—now creates unified customer profiles from disparate software-as-a-service applications and databases. To get started with Amazon Connect, visit aws.amazon.com/connect/.

Contact centers are a critical customer service channel for organizations to provide support and build relationships with their customers. With the advent of generative AI, contact center leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to redefine how they create and measure their customers’ experiences. However, taking advantage of LLMs and other FMs is a difficult endeavor requiring technical expertise that is in short supply and high demand. Even when utilizing existing models, industry-specific data must be used to fine-tune models that generate responses tailored to an organization’s business. Integrating these models into new customer experience applications that work with an organization’s existing suite of contact center tools requires further industry-specific expertise. Amazon Connect removes the challenges of building and deploying models in contact centers by allowing non-technical business leaders to set up a cloud contact center with generative AI capabilities within minutes. The new generative AI capabilities of Amazon Connect include:
 

• Amazon Q in Connect: generative AI to assist agents with recommended responses and actions for faster customer support. Agents play a critical role in helping organizations build customer trust and loyalty by guiding customers through complex decisions, helping customers understand policies and terms, suggesting new products and services, providing fast and accurate solutions when issues arise, and capturing a record of every customer interaction. Amazon Q, a new type of generative AI-powered assistant that can be tailored for any business, provides new agent assistance for the contact center. Amazon Q in Connect helps understand customer intents and uses relevant sources of information to deliver accurate responses and actions for the agent to communicate and resolve unique customer needs, all in real time. For example, Amazon Q in Connect can detect that a customer is contacting a rental car company to change their reservation, generate a response for the agent to quickly communicate how the company’s change-fee policies apply to this customer, and guide the agent through the steps they need to update the reservation. By empowering agents to address customer needs across a broad range of topics without assistance from supervisors, Amazon Q in Connect increases customer satisfaction and helps build loyal customer relationships, while reducing agent training, resolution times, and costs.
• Amazon Connect Contact Lens: post-contact summarization for increased productivity. To help improve customer interactions and ensure details are available for future reference, contact center supervisors rely on the notes that agents manually create after every customer interaction. To further contextualize those notes, supervisors must listen to large volumes of customer conversations, or read through complete conversation transcripts, since failure to correctly capture and act upon information from the conversation can lower contact center quality and erode customer trust. Amazon Connect Contact Lens now generates concise customer contact summaries after each interaction to provide supervisors with those context-rich details. Moments after a customer interaction, Amazon Connect Contact Lens identifies important details of the customer conversation—such as the customer’s issue, the actions taken by the agent, and the next steps required to close the loop with the customer—and generates a short summary. Supervisors can then use these summaries to inform efforts to improve contact center quality. For example, supervisors can use summaries to track commitments made to customers and ensure prompt completion of follow-up actions. When investigating a customer issue, supervisors can review an auto-generated summary of previous interactions without having to listen to the call recording or read the transcript. By saving time with concise summaries of customer calls, supervisors can more effectively monitor performance for all customer interactions and scale quality management.
• Amazon Lex in Amazon Connect: generative AI to simplify bot building and create improved self-service experiences. The creation of personalized, self-service chatbots and IVR systems requires contact center administrators to account for every aspect of a conversation—including customer intents, responses, and interaction flows. When these systems are unable to address uncommon responses or inquiries from customers, it often requires escalation to a contact center agent and creates customer frustration. Amazon Connect now makes it easier to build more effective and personalized self-service experiences provided by chatbots and IVRs. From the Amazon Lex administrator console, contact center administrators can create robust chatbots and IVRs by simply describing in natural language what they want the self-service system to accomplish. For example, a contact center administrator could type, “Build a bot to handle hotel reservations using customer name and contact information, travel dates, room type, and payment details.” Using this prompt, Amazon Lex will generate sample utterances and create a chatbot or IVR, reducing the time and complexity of building self-service systems. In addition, contact center administrators can now deploy more effective self-service systems that eliminate the need to anticipate all possible questions and answers. When customers reply to chatbots or IVRs with less common responses, Amazon Connect leverages models to correctly interpret the customer’s response. For example, if a customer says they want to reserve a hotel room for “Saturday and Sunday,” the self-service system correctly interprets the response as “two nights.” Contact center administrators can also create question-and-answer chatbots and IVRs directly using Amazon Lex, which will generate responses for common customer questions by searching through an organization’s existing knowledge base and summarizing the most relevant details. These self-service chatbot and IVR systems can be instantly deployed into any website.
• Amazon Connect Customer Profiles: automatic creation of unified customer profiles for personalized customer experiences. Customers expect personalized customer service experiences, which require contact centers to have a comprehensive understanding of customers' preferences, purchases, and interactions. To achieve that, contact center administrators need to create unified customer profiles by merging customer data from dozens of applications. Now, Amazon Connect Customer Profiles leverages models to reduce the timeneeded to provide personalized customer experiences.When contact center administrators add data sources—such as Adobe Analytics, Salesforce, ServiceNow, ZenDesk or Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3)—Amazon Connect Customer Profiles will analyze the data to understand what the data format and content represent and how the data relates to customers’ profiles. Amazon Connect Customer Profiles then determines how to organize and combine data from different sources into complete, accurate profiles. With just a few clicks, managers can review, make any necessary edits, and complete the setup of customer profiles so contact center teams can begin providing personalized customer service that improves customer satisfaction and agent productivity.

“The contact center industry is poised to be fundamentally transformed by generative AI, offering customer service agents, contact center supervisors, and contact center administrators new ways to deliver personalized customer experiences even more effectively. Yet few organizations have the advanced machine learning expertise to easily harness this technology and apply it to their operations,” said Pasquale DeMaio, vice president, Amazon Connect, AWS Applications. “With just a few clicks, contact center leaders can leverage new capabilities powered by generative AI in Amazon Connect to enhance the more than 15 million customer interactions handled on Amazon Connect every day. With these new capabilities, contact centers can consistently deliver improved customer support at scale.”

In addition to these new generative AI enhancements, Amazon Connect has extended omnichannel capabilities to include out-of-the-box support for two-way SMS messaging, as well as in-app and web voice calling with support for video. These new omnichannel communications—as well as the generative AI enhancements to Amazon Lex, Amazon Q in Connect, and Amazon Connect Customer profiles—are generally available. New generative AI capabilities in Amazon Connect Contact Lens are available in preview.

Choice Hotels is a leading global lodging franchisor with a vast network of nearly 7,500 hotels, representing almost 630,000 rooms across 46 countries and territories. “Today, our team spends significant time to understand customer data relationships and create data mappings. Data objects such as hotel booking or loyalty can be very complex with multi-level nesting,” said Michael Bennett, distinguished engineer at Choice Hotels. “Using the Amazon Connect generative AI data mapping feature will reduce the onboarding time and provide guidance on which data columns to use for the unique identification of a profile. With it, we will onboard future specialized data sources much quicker and enrich our Guest 360 profiles with the data to power our real-time personalization initiatives.”

NatWest Group is a relationship bank for a digital world, serving 19 million people, families, and businesses in communities throughout the UK and Ireland. “For our customers to feel supported through financial decisions at every stage of their lives, they need timely responses and a consistent experience regardless of which agent they speak with,” said Angela Byrne, chief operating officer, Retail Banking at NatWest. “Yet providing accurate details on our vast array of products and services across all of our brands often requires that our agents spend time searching across our knowledge management sources while customers wait for an answer. NatWest Group believes generative AI presents a great opportunity for our business, especially within the contact center. We expect that Amazon Q in Connect will ensure both our new and experienced agents are prompted in real time with accurate information to provide a consistently high-quality customer experience.”

NeuraFlash is a leading consulting andindependent software vendor partner of AWS, focused on helping customers transform their businesses with AI-powered experiences. “Our customers who are looking to get more business value from their customer conversations find that long call recordings and transcripts can be cumbersome to listen through for the quality assurance team, supervisors, the next agent to work with the customer, and others across the organization,” said Patrick Beyries, head of Product and Innovation at NeuraFlash. “Amazon Connect Contact Lens’ new automatic contact summarizations will allow our customers to more effectively understand and share what happened in a customer conversation and, just as importantly, what to do next to drive customer success and business results.”

Traeger Grills is a leading provider of smokers, grills, and barbeque products. “As we have grown our customer base and diversified our product offerings, one of our biggest challenges has been in providing our agents and supervisors with the right information at the right time to increase customer satisfaction,” said Corey Savory, vice president, Customer Experience and Service at Traeger Grills. “Amazon Connect’s new generative AI features have shown great promise in testing at our contact center. In the future, we envision these features will enable our agents and supervisors to focus on delivering premier customer experiences. We anticipate Amazon Q in Connect will improve agent efficiency by 20% by providing agents with generated responses and actions that are specific to customer needs. By concisely summarizing important information from customer conversations using Amazon Connect Contact Lens in a structured, easy-to-read format, supervisors will no longer need to invest valuable time in listening to entire call recordings or reading detailed transcripts.”

USAN provides cloud-based contact center technology and services to customers around the world. “Improving agent, supervisor, and contact center administrator support is top-of-mind for our customers today to deliver better end-customer outcomes,” said Steve Herlocher, senior vice president of Product at USAN. “Amazon Connect’s new, built-in generative AI capabilities will help our customers efficiently create unified customer profiles through better data mapping, improve contact center supervisor efficiency with post-contact summarization in Contact Lens, and onboard agents faster with suggested responses and actions. Best of all, our customers can start using these generative AI-powered capabilities immediately in Amazon Connect, without the need to build and deploy large language models.”

At AWS re:Invent, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, announced Amazon One Enterprise, a palm-based identity service for comprehensive and easy-to-use authentication that improves organizational security and helps prevent costly security breaches. The new service enables organizations to provide a fast, convenient, and contactless experience for employees and other authorized users to gain access to physical locations (e.g., data centers, office and residential buildings, airports, hotels and resorts, and educational institutions), as well as digital assets such as restricted software resources (e.g., financial data and HR records). Amazon One Enterprise eliminates operational overhead associated with the management of traditional enterprise authentication methods, like badges and PINs. IT and security administrators can easily install the Amazon One devices and manage users, devices, and software updates in the AWS Management Console. 

Today, organizations authenticate employees and other authorized individuals to access buildings and software resources through physical means like badges and fobs, or digital methods like PINs and passwords. However, these traditional methods share common security vulnerabilities. Badges and fobs can be lost, shared, cloned, or stolen, while PINs and passwords are easily forgotten, guessable, or shared. Many traditional forms of authentication also require manual verification and time-intensive credential management, along with the cost of producing physical IDs. For employees, forgetting or replacing badges, PINs, and passwords can lead to frustration, wasted time, and lower productivity. Organizations have tried to solve these challenges through biometric-based solutions like iris scanning and fingerprint recognition, but these solutions are not always accurate. Customers also want solutions that help break silos in the implementation and management of user authentication. For example, an organization might use badges to access buildings, but passwords to access software resources and digital assets. This requires administrators to manage multiple authentication methods without full visibility into all authorized access across the organization. IT and security administrators want an easy and centralized view of authentications (e.g., who accesses a location or software resource at what time), and to easily monitor device usage and manage software updates.

Amazon One Enterprise is a new, fully managed service that provides highly accurate and secure enterprise access control through an easy-to-use biometric identification device. Security is built into every stage of the service, from multi-layered security controls in the Amazon One device to protection of data in transit and in the cloud. Amazon One Enterprise combines palm and vein imagery for biometric matching and delivers an accuracy rate of 99.9999%, which exceeds the accuracy of other biometric alternatives—even more accurate than scanning two irises. The new service’s palm-recognition technology uses advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a palm signature that is associated with identification credentials like a badge, employee ID, or PIN. The palm signature is a unique numerical vector created from the user’s palm image that cannot be replicated or used for impersonation. To implement Amazon One Enterprise, IT and security administrators can easily install Amazon One devices on-site and activate them in the AWS Management Console. Administrators can also manage all aspects of user authentications in the console, including monitoring the status of installed devices, managing software updates, and getting analytics on user enrollment and usage, while reducing the amount of time and overhead involved in the manual verification of credentials. Additionally, with employees using their palms for authentication, customers eliminate much of the cost associated with buying fobs, and printing, issuing, and managing badges and other IDs. Amazon One Enterprise supports industry standard access-control protocols such as Open Supervised Device Protocol (OSDP) and Wiegand.

“Amazon One Enterprise’s palm recognition technology is designed to deliver a highly accurate identification service that increases an organization’s overall security, while offering seamless authentication management with lower operational overhead,” said Dilip Kumar, vice president of AWS Applications. “With Amazon One Enterprise, security administrators also have a centralized view of all user authentications across the organization, taking the stress out of managing multiple access control solutions. Businesses appreciate the privacy and convenience for their users, who can access physical locations and software assets with just a hover of their palm.”

Amazon One Enterprise delivers new levels of convenience for employees. It replaces the need for multiple authentication methods, and employees can use their palm to access physical spaces and digital assets. To begin, a user can enroll by hovering their palm over an Amazon One enrollment device and associating their palm with their organization’s preferred ID—such as badges, PINs, and passwords—and this can be done in less than a minute. After enrollment, users access physical locations simply by hovering their palm over an Amazon One device attached to common physical access control systems for uses such as unlocking doors, entry gates, and other barriers. When connected to computers or other enterprise systems, Amazon One Enterprise authenticates users for access to web applications and software. Protecting the privacy of these users is one of the foundational elements of Amazon One Enterprise. The new service is designed to ensure palm images, user credentials, and other metadata are immediately encrypted, using industry leading encryption technology, and sent to a dedicated Amazon One Enterprise service account in the AWS Cloud, with all of the security and isolation features of AWS. To further enhance privacy, each user’s palm data is encrypted using a unique key. When employees leave the organization or decide to unenroll, they can conveniently delete their palm data by choosing the Unenrolloption on the Amazon One device, or an IT administrator can unenroll them through the AWS Management Console.

Amazon One Enterprise is available in preview in the U.S.

Boon Edam is a leading manufacturer of revolving doors, security doors, and security turnstiles for customers across the globe. “Our mission at Boon Edam is to protect what matters most to our customers by creating an ideal secured entry solution,” said Patrick Nora, president, Boon Edam Americas. “With Amazon One Enterprise, we can offer authorized entrances using innovative palm biometric technology that raises our security bar and delivers a convenient workplace experience. Our customers can prevent unauthorized entry, reduce the time spent monitoring access, and keep traffic moving smoothly.”

IHG Hotels & Resorts is a global hospitality company with over 6,000 hotels in more than 100 countries. “We are excited to work with Amazon One Enterprise for a more secure, efficient way to manage authentication and access our systems,” said Nick Krieble, global head of Identity and Access Management, IHG. “With Amazon One Enterprise, our goal is to offer employees a new and convenient way to identify themselves and gain access to our software systems by hovering their palm over the Amazon One device. This approach will streamline the way we authenticate, give staff access to the tools they need, and make access easier than ever for them.”

Paznic is a security company that specializes in technology that simplifies and modernizes the way financial institutions manage access control and safety deposit boxes. “Our goal at Paznic is to deliver solutions to meet the demands of financial institutions and high security environments that hold important and valuable assets,“ said Jonathan Curelar, CEO, Paznic. “Amazon One Enterprise will help us ensure only authorized individuals can gain room entry and safety deposit box access without the use of pins and passcodes. We look forward to launching Amazon One Enterprise across our locations to improve our safety deposit box experience and deliver the highest level of security and satisfaction to our customers.”

AWS Global Cloud Infrastructure is the most secure, extensive, and reliable cloud, offering more than 240 fully featured services from data centers in 102 Availability Zones within 32 geographic regions. “Amazon One Enterprise raises our security bar while delivering a convenient experience for our workforce,” said Kevin Harris, director of Global Security for AWS Data Centers. “Legacy radio frequency identification systems have inherent vulnerabilities and require additional manual verifications at checkpoints. With Amazon One Enterprise, we can provide secure access to authorized personnel without extra verification, while simplifying the authentication process and reducing the risk of physical breaches. We look forward to expanding Amazon One Enterprise across all our locations.”

KONE is a leading provider of elevators and escalators, making people’s journeys safe, convenient, and reliable in taller, smarter buildings. “We are integrating Amazon One Enterprise into our People Flow Solutions, so we can offer customers a more secure and reliable option for building entry and access,” said Steve Gonzalez, senior vice president, New Building Solutions, Americas. “We are excited to work with Amazon One Enterprise to deliver cutting-edge solutions designed to ensure smooth, efficient, and secure flows of people into, through, and out of all types of buildings.”

Hotel Investor Apps (HIA), the hospitality-specific ERP and accounting platform, announced today that Lark Hotels, a management company specializing in luxury and boutique hotels with 125 keys or less, has implemented its ERP and accounting solution for its portfolio of 50+ properties.

With Hotel Investor Apps, Lark Hotels increased access and visibility into financial management by setting up 100+ team members in the system (with role-based permissions), taking advantage of HIA's unlimited user capability. Lark now has automated PMS and POS imports, new custom integrations, and an automated accounts payable solution - all towards driving greater efficiency. In addition, Lark Hotels now enjoys improved reporting and real-time dashboards.

"Our previous software system was almost like a black box that no one was allowed to touch and only these very highly selected individuals got to look inside it. HIA is the exact opposite," said Scot Hopps, VP of Operations, Lark Hotels.

The results of switching to HIA have been transformative, according to Hopps, "There's a lot that I can say that HIA has improved. We are substantially better on behalf of the teams that we support, because of the visibility, the accessibility, the speed, and just the accuracy of the information. HIA has put us in a dramatically better position as a group."

Charlie Fritsch, CEO of HIA, remarked, "Hoteliers are no longer willing to accept outdated, inflexible software that requires extra work and workarounds. They want software that works harder, so that they can work smarter. HIA is built to enable that efficiency and visibility."

Hotel Internet Services (HIS), a full-service provider of internet services and solutions for the hospitality industry, has announced its successful implementation of a robust network of security camera solutions at Shephard’s Beach Resort in Clearwater, Florida. An upscale location featuring breathtaking views that attract a diverse range of guests from across the globe, Shephard’s Beach Resort through its latest technology investment with HIS can now ensure that each visitor obtains the relaxation and peace of mind that is essential to enjoying their stay experience.

Serving as the premier entertainment destination on Florida’s Gulf Coast, Shephard’s Beach Resort is situated on nearly three acres of prime real-estate, with its own personal beach joined by a wide range of enticing amenities such as a salt bar & tap room, soak pool and even an onsite Wave Night Club located at the resort’s world famous Entertainment Complex. Yet while featuring an extensive range of attractions and experiences, Shephard’s Beach Resort, due to its substantial property size, was in need of enhanced onsite security in order to ensure guest safety at all times and within all areas.

Previously partnering with Hotel Internet Services to deploy state-of-the-art guest WiFi and in-room entertainment, resort leadership was already well acquainted with the provider’s proven expertise and its ability to supply the latest advances in hospitality industry technology. Leveraging its decades-worth of experience in deploying surveillance camera technology for hospitality-based businesses, HIS technicians immediately went to work on identifying the best hardware to install within specific resort areas. This included the installation of bullet and turret cameras, with bullet cameras serving as an easily recognizable sign that a location is being actively monitored, while turret cameras provide resort staff with enhanced control in order to gain added coverage visibility for specific areas.

“We are a very busy beachside resort with many outlets, so keeping an eye on all things that may arise across the property can undoubtedly be a challenge which is why we partnered with Hotel Internet Services to finally improve our surveillance operations,” said Paul Andrews, General Manager at Shephard’s Beach Resort. “We previously struggled with several other surveillance companies that failed us miserably, but HIS, through their expertise and access to the latest in technology, has brought us into the 21^st century. Not only is their system solid, but it is also very user-friendly for our staff. The installation process was also seamless and their employees are always professional and efficient. These days, businesses need to rely on a good camera system and we now have that. Our insurance company wanted us to maintain several months of footage and Hotel Internet Service accomplished that for us. Hotel Internet Service has given us peace of mind with a reliable camera system, and outstanding service.”

As a leading provider of connectivity-based solutions for hotels and resorts, HIS and its solutions are further backed by the industry’s leading support services. Available 24/7, 365 days a year, HIS support personnel are reliably on hand to provide Shephard’s Beach Resort as well as other customers with immediate assistance the moment a performance issue arises.