Case study on thin client implementation by Hilton. TROI factors included Real Estate Cost Avoidance, greater systems control, encourage work-from-home, equipment cost avoidance, MTBF, and salary savings.

This is a good time to be in the hospitality industry. Leisure travel is up 19 percent since 2000, and hotel occupancy rates continue to grow, despite average daily room rate increases of five to six percent in 2007. While this boom is affecting most hospitality companies, no company in the industry is growing faster than Hilton Hotels Corporation. Between 2000 and 2006, Hilton added 1,000 hotels to its system and expects to add another 900 by 2010. Currently, it has more than 2,800 hotels and 480,000 rooms in 76 countries and territories, and employs 100,000 team members worldwide.

Keeping those rooms booked is Hilton’s top priority, and the company is doing very well on that measure. Many of its hotels - in the U.S. in particular - are operating at occupancy levels in the high 80 percent range with room rates at all-time highs. Hilton’s RevPAR (revenue per available room) - the all-important metric in the lodging industry - grew 30 percent from 2002 to 2006.

The challenge for management at Hilton Reservations and Customer Care Group is to provide high-quality customer service to the growing number of travelers inquiring about reservations, as efficiently as possible. The company wanted to increase its quality of customer service while decreasing its call center costs, and realized that a work-at-home program for its call center staff could address both requirements.

The flexibility of working at home appeals to more job applicants, including many well educated and skilled people such as stay-at-home mothers and teachers on summer break. Hilton can offer these flex-time workers hours when demand is high and cut back during slow seasons, helping it to match capacity to demand for optimal efficiency and cost savings.

The Challenge:

• Reduce call center space requirements
• Decrease costs associated with taking reservations
• Expand skilled flex-time workforce

In addition, the going rate for a part-time work-at-home agent is approximately $6 an hour less than for a traditional full-time agent, plus the savings in employee benefits. Hilton Reservations also saw a work-at-home program as an opportunity to reduce its number of call center locations. This could result in savings on real estate, power, and other physical support costs.

Beginning in 2004, Hilton Reservations and Customer Care experimented with a remote call center program, issuing employees PCs and having them dial in to the corporate network and reservation system. However, by late 2006 the group concluded that the program wasn’t working, from either a business or an IT point of view. Approximately a dozen agents were using PCs from home, but even that limited number of agents required almost one full-time IT employee to support their technical needs. Technical issues impacted the agents’ productivity, and consumed a disproportionate amount of technical resources.

Solution: Enabling Agents through Thin Computing

Steve Christian, senior systems engineer at Hilton Reservations and Customer Care, and Chris Charbonneau, systems engineer, began researching options by looking at other companies with work-at-home programs, such as JetBlue, which has no call centers. Christian and Charbonneau saw the opportunity to follow and improve upon the example set by JetBlue, which outfits remote employees with PCs and expensive local routers.

“We wanted to move away from the model of supporting local computers over a network,” explains Christian. “In our experience, managing individual PCs remotely took too much time and had the potential to expose our reservations system to viruses and spyware. We started thinking about thin-client computing.”

 “It costs us significantly less to outfit and support our staff with Wyse thin clients than with PCs”

“It’s the perfect solution for us,” comments Christian. “It costs us significantly less to outfit and support our staff with Wyse thin clients than with PCs. We manage everything centrally on the server, instead of troubleshooting each PC. The Wyse thin client solution also enables us to fully protect our corporate system. The worst thing that can happen is a malfunction with the thin client, and if that happens, we simply give the team member a new one.”

When Hilton Reservations and Customer Care hires new work-at-home agents, it provides six weeks of training on site, in the evenings. During the third week of training, the company provides trainees with a thin-client device. They take it home, plug it in, and practice from home.

“Next year, we’re going to experiment with remote training,” says Christian. “Trainees will come in, we’ll give them a thin client, and they can take classes through web conferencing and do all their training from their homes during scheduled on-line classes with the Hilton training department.”