ROBINSON Club improves information flow and customer satisfaction

To read a German version of this case study, click here.

ROBINSON Club GmbH is part of the World of TUI, and is headquartered in Hannover, Germany. It is the market leader in Germany in premium resort holidays. The company operates 24 countryside resorts and one city location across 11 countries, with a total capacity of 13,400 beds.

ROBINSON employs a large number of seasonal staff, and information flow was always an issue. In the past, the company had built a portal solution, but only a small fraction of its employees had access to this system. Important messages had to be forwarded manually, usually by being printed and distributed to relevant staff by their managers.

Based on insights from an evaluation of its existing portal solution, ROBINSON compiled a list of requirements which a new intranet portal would need to meet. The company put a strong focus on user experience and wanted to provide all employees with a clean and structured tool featuring a role-based interface. The solution also needed to enable employees to create and manage more dynamic content, and to offer social features for easy collaboration within the resorts and between members of geographically distributed teams. Continued support for existing document management tools and comprehensive search capabilities were also key requirements to enable employees to find all relevant information quickly.

ROBINSON looked for a reliable partner capable of working effectively with various different departments and delivering a fast implementation.

A modern collaboration solution
ROBINSON had already been working with IBM Premier Business Partner GIS on several groupware and portal projects. ROBINSON invited the GIS team to propose a solution that would meet the company’s requirements. GIS offered to deploy its ‘GIS Collaboration Center for Intranets’ solution to address the company’s communication challenges.

GIS Collaboration Center is a pre-configured stack of collaboration and content management applications that combine to enable fast and easy rollouts of powerful intranet solutions.

The applications include IBM WebSphere® Portal, IBM Connections, IBM Sametime®, IBM Quickr® and IBM Web Content Manager, all running on Linux and provided in a single preconfigured VMware image. This unique bundled solution, which also includes a Nagios monitoring interface, allowed GIS to skip an installation and configuration process that could have taken up to 43 days to complete. Instead it was able to start immediately with the actual implementation after only three days.

Successful implementation
Considering that usability is a core requirement of any intranet project, GIS and ROBINSON worked closely together to define the perfect information architecture and interface design before the actual implementation work began. The combined project team based its interface prototypes on a user survey about the previous portal solution.

Working with GIS, ROBINSON subsequently implemented the new social collaboration solution. In the past, the only people who were able to access the company’s intranet were the 900 staff who had a Lotus Notes® email account. By contrast, the new social software solution mainly based on IBM Connections and IBM WebSphere Portal does not depend on email; it can be accessed through any browser, which means that ROBINSON can give direct access to important business information to all of its approximately 4,500 employees worldwide without increasing costs. Staff members can sign up using a self-registration feature, which keeps the administration workload low. Once registered, they can create detailed personal profiles indicating their qualifications and interests, making it easy for others seeking relevant help to find them. Furthermore, registration enables employees to share knowledge and comment on information and experience posted by others.

“With a high proportion of seasonal staff who might only work for a few months at one of our resorts, we don’t want to have to set up a full email account for every individual employee,” says Heike Caban, Head of Application Development at ROBINSON. “This was not only an organisational decision, but also driven by licensing costs. Now, with the new collaboration solution, we can help all our employees access and share information without the hassle of setting up and managing large numbers of short-lived email accounts.”

For employees already using IBM Lotus Notes, ROBINSON has integrated an email portlet into the new intranet solution, providing a one-stop shop for all online activities. Furthermore, the project team has connected the new solution to some of ROBINSON’s existing IBM Lotus Domino® applications, which streamlines workflows and provides relevant services such as a business travel application form to the entire workforce.

Social features to foster collaboration
To enable collaboration within ROBINSON, GIS implemented a software solution featuring social collaboration tools such as blogs, wikis, tag clouds and detailed profile pages. All staff – seasonal and permanent – are encouraged to share their lessons learned and best practices in blogs. Co-workers can comment on the ideas and experiences of others, discuss hot topics in communities and write customer service reports to collaboratively improve service quality for ROBINSON’s guests. For the first time, this allows ROBINSON to retain the knowledge of temporary staff even after they have moved on.

For easy navigation and a quick overview, every resort and location has its own individual homepage, containing all relevant information concerning the resort. Providing a central starting point has improved information flow within the resorts substantially. “In the past it was not possible to pass information directly to every employee,” says Heike Caban. “Now we simply post it on the portal, and all employees can access the information immediately. Moreover, they can do more than just read it; they can also provide feedback and start discussions.”

With most of the staff working at the resorts, many employees do not have offices or even individual desks. To help these users access information more easily, the new solution provides seamless mobile access, so staff can keep up to date using smart phones or tablet computers.

ROBINSON is a premium brand, and its customers demand highly qualified and well informed staff. With the GIS Collaboration Center solution, the company can ensure that all members of staff know what’s going on and are able to help any customer at any time. “Our goal with this intranet project was clearly to improve customer satisfaction,” says Heike Caban. “By increasing efficiency in handling and distributing information, we managed to provide our staff with all the information they need in a convenient way, enabling them to be better informed while spending less time searching for information and more on serving our guests.”

“With our new communication and collaboration platform, we can improve information management, retain the knowledge of seasonal staff within the company, and thus increase customer satisfaction in our resorts,” says Bernd Schindler, CIO at ROBINSON Club Gmbh. “We are very satisfied with the positive impact that this solution has had on our business.”