Luxury hotel group Radisson Edwardian chooses NextiraOne to deliver system upgrades, unified communications and a new five-year support contract

[lichfield] – 03 January, 2009. Europe’s leading expert in communications services, NextiraOne, is upgrading the Radisson Edwardian Hotel Group’s communications system and has signed a new five-year support contract. The group, which runs 13 hotels in prime locations across central London, at Heathrow and in Manchester, has chosen NextiraOne to implement the improvements which will see the hotels at the forefront of customer service with leading edge telephony and streamlined communications for staff and guests.
 
Under the contracts, together worth over £800K over five years, NextiraOne will maintain and upgrade the hotel group’s IP communications system, including its contact centre, based in the Sussex Hotel, which handles individual reservations and also group bookings across all Radisson Edwardian hotels.

NextiraOne has also provided a centralised switchboard based at the Radisson Edwardian Hotel, Heathrow. This deals with all the in-house switchboard functions for around 2000 rooms in all the 13 Radisson Edwardian Hotels and handles everything from wake-up calls to requests for room service. By centralising the service, Radisson Edwardian is able to provide the very highest levels of customer service, with dedicated staff specially trained to deal with their customers’ needs, rather than leaving the task to front desk staff that may have other more immediate duties to perform. The approach ensures consistently high levels of customer service at any time of the day or night and avoids the typical delays that occur at busy check-in and check-out times.

NextiraOne will upgrade the IP communications enterprise infrastructure in the hotels and then maintain them at each location, providing a secure, full inter-site network with full roaming and mobility features. This will greatly improve the communications between hotels and will make maintaining and upgrading the system much more straightforward in the future.

Iype Abraham, IT Director at Radisson Edwardian Hotels Group said: “We have a long-standing relationship with NextiraOne for our communications services and we trusted them to be able to deliver against our defined objectives. In today’s market it’s even more important for us that our guests experience a consistently high level of service and we did not want any disruption during the transition – that’s why we decided to stay with a partner we knew and trusted. We knew that NextiraOne would be able to deliver what we wanted.”

Roll-out will take place in February 2009 and will include Alcatel-Lucent’s new My Instant Communicator unified messaging applications which will allow staff to access all types of message regardless of where they are or what device they are using.

Steven Skakel, Managing Director UK & Ireland at NextiraOne, said: “We pride ourselves on our long-term relationships that come from a clear understanding of what’s really important to our customers.  The Radisson Edwardian Group has a strong track-record of investing in technology to help improve the manageability of their business and the service they deliver. This is another example of how we are able to help our customers build on existing investments to deliver tangible improvements.”