Front Desk Support
Over the course of their hotel stay, guests interact most with your front desk personnel. The front desk support team is mainly responsible for maintaining high standards of guest services.
Over the course of their hotel stay, guests interact most with your front desk personnel. The front desk support teams are mainly responsible for maintaining high standards of guest services.
As you develop a strategy around the best way to accommodate electric vehicles (EVs), front desk support becomes a crucial element to consider. As electric vehicles become more mainstream, guests who arrive in EVs will expect to be able to charge their vehicles during their stay.
Only about 25% of hotels in the US offer EV charging. Yet more than two-thirds of EV drivers (in a recent survey in the UK) state that the availability of EV chargers influences their choice of accommodations. Nearly half would not stay at a hotel that didn’t have EV chargers. A similar sentiment likely applies to North American EV drivers.
The installation of EV chargers involves more than simply dropping equipment in the parking lot and forgetting it. Instead, optimizing front desk support can go a long way toward attracting new guests, enhancing your brand, and improving your overall guest experience,
EV Charger Power Management
Optimal front desk support for EV chargers relies on the collection, integration, and interpretation of data. Networked EV chargers can connect with your hotel’s systems and provide data automatically that helps front desk personnel support the guest experience.
Developing Your Business Strategy
Future Energy works with you to clarify your goals for EV charging. Your underlying business strategy informs how you integrate EV charging into your front desk operations.
For example, you may choose to offer EV charging as another revenue stream. Or perhaps it’s a perk for loyal guests. Maybe EV charging is part of your core guest experience like wireless internet is now.
Integrating Business Intelligence into Front Desk Operations
To help fulfill your goals, Future Energy offers a smart technology and energy management cloud software platform called Interface. Interface connects your guest management system to networked EV chargers.
Just as guests use your hotel’s app to pay for snacks or check out, they can use their hotel app to pay for and monitor EV charging sessions.
Customizing Integrations for Your Business
Through Interface, Future Energy provides your front desk personnel with the data they need to support your guests. The data includes:
- Status of EV charging sessions
- Health and operability information of the equipment
- Fees for EV charging
Future Energy’s custom integrations work with your business software.
Incorporating Seamless Guest Interactions
Future Energy helps your hotel to incorporate the EV charging experience as seamlessly as possible into front desk guest interactions. Your personnel should be as adept at answering guests’ questions and concerns about EV charging as they are when explaining the on-site gym or restaurants.
Managing Hotel Guest Movement
Front desk support includes serving guests who are checking in, checking out, and leaving temporarily with plans to return to the hotel. You will need to coordinate EV charging with your parking operations.
One option is to integrate EV charging with your valet services. The valet can rotate electric vehicles to optimize the use of the equipment. They can remove cars that have finished charging and plug in the next EV in line.
Employees at the front desk also should be able to handle guests’ EV charging requests. Guests may ask to have their cars fully charged by a certain time. Your front desk can accommodate these requests and coordinate key card drop-off with the valet.
Addressing EV Charger Issues
Occasionally, your EV charging equipment may have operational issues. Your front desk personnel will have to understand the procedures involved with repairs and how to communicate efficiently with guests regarding any problems that arise.
Once integrated with your hotel’s systems, Interface can push alerts to the front desk to alert them of any issues with the hotel’s EV chargers. Interface also proactively notifies Future Energy if it detects any performance issues.
In many cases, Future Energy is aware of problems even before the hotel is notified and can send someone to resolve the issue. Future Energy also can work with your hotel’s technology team to resolve issues remotely, if appropriate. Either way, we work to get any issues resolved immediately to prevent interruption to the guest experience.
Explaining EV Charging Costs to Guests
The determination of who will pay for EV charging is part of your business strategy. Front desk personnel must have a good understanding of the costs involved so that they can answer guests’ questions about the cost of EV charging.
States have different rules that govern how to set pricing for EV charging. For example, most—but not all—states allow kilowatt-per-hour pricing. Kilowatt-per-hour pricing bases fees on the amount of electricity used.
In other states, consumers pay for charging by the minutes the EV spends on the charging apparatus. Future Energy helps owners with franchises in multiple states work within these complex regulations, customizing Interface to support your particular situation for each location.
Training Front Desk Personnel
Employee training is a final step once you have installed the hardware, established the appropriate networking, and integrated successfully with your IT business systems. Future Energy provides a customized training course for your business to distribute across the entire organization.
Providing EV Charging Reference Materials
As part of our partnership with your business, Future Energy is there to answer questions. We introduce your training team to everything they need to know to support the front desk when it comes to EV charging. Additionally, we provide physical materials that you can include with your front desk training program.
Understanding Types of EV Chargers
Part of Future Energy’s training involves educating hotel personnel on the types of EV charging available. Most hotel use cases call for the installation of level 2 chargers, which run off 240-volt power and can deliver charges up to 40 miles per hour. Your hotel also may choose to install level 3 chargers, which run off direct current and can fully charge an EV in well under an hour.
Estimating Time to Charge for Guests
Front desk personnel need to be equipped to answer the question: “How long will it take to charge my EV?”
The answer depends on a number of factors, including:
- Current charge level of the vehicle’s battery
- Vehicle’s battery capacity
- Type of EV charger used
Typically, guests won’t know their battery capacity. But with proper training, your front desk employees will be able to look it up if they know the make and model of the EV. They also will learn general ways to approximate EV charging times.
In almost all situations, an EV charging on a commercial level 2 charger will fully charge in less than eight hours.
Enhancing the Guest Experience with Front Desk Support for EV Charging
Future Energy works as your partner to bring front desk personnel up to speed with the EV charging solutions you plan to offer. Contact Future Energy today for more information on why front desk support is an important part of enhancing the guest experience when it comes to EV charging.
