The Cullinan Hotel Cape Town, part of the Southern Sun group, has subscribed to Storm SMS to further enhance its customer service capabilities. Guests of the hotel can now have information, such as their reservation confirmations, sent to their cellphones via SMS. This ensures they have immediate access to booking details at any time.
Christo Els, financial manager at the Cullinan, says: "This hotel prides itself on the individual attention we provide our guests. We are continually looking for new ways to enhance our clients' experience and the beauty of this product is that it offers our guests a very personalised service without being invasive."
Storm SMS is based on a suite of PC software and GSM hardware that allows users to send SMS messages directly from a computer to a cellphone without the use of a modem.
Tim Wyatt-Gunning, managing director of storm, says: "A key benefit of Storm SMS is that, unlike many other communication mediums, it provides the sender with delivery reports and message logs so that one can track whether a message has been sent and delivered. In addition, as the information is stored on a guest's cellphone rather than on a piece of paper or buried in an inbox of a laptop, it is very accessible."
The system will go live in mid-November. "Although the technology has been installed and is essentially up and running, the hotel is going to wait until all operational procedures have been finalised before beginning with the service. We want this technology to benefit our guests, not irritate them. Therefore we need to be sure of the administration details such as who has access to the system and what kind of messages are authorised to be sent," says Els.
Storm and the Cullinan have been working together for over a year. Storm SMS is the third of the company's products the hotel has installed, following Storm International and Storm Cellular. "All of storm's products have had a positive effect on our business and enabled the hotel to better control and monitor costs, while simultaneously improving our service to guests. I am sure that we will see very similar results once the SMS service is fully introduced," concludes Els.
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Storm is the South African retail brand for STWS, a leading low-cost voice and data service provider for the African market. Focusing exclusively on the needs of business users, storm was launched in Cape Town in June 1999. Storm's goal is to challenge the major players in the telecoms market by consistently providing innovative voice and data products and services that help companies to communicate more efficiently and cost-effectively.
Storm currently provides over 4 000 South African businesses with a range of high quality voice and data communication services including storm international, storm cellular, storm access, storm fax and storm sms. Storm international lowers the cost of a business's international calls through its latest callback technology. Storm cellular and storm fax reduce the cost of calls to cellular phones and the sending of faxes. With STWS's acquisition of ITI's ISP business in 2000, storm offers Internet connectivity, which includes domain name registration, Web site design and server hosting services. Furthermore, storm is positioning itself to offer converged voice and data services on one network, once deregulation of the local telecommunications market takes place.
Owning and managing its own network, storm will continue to differentiate itself in the South African market by providing value-added services such as its newly launched Customer Zone and VOIP (once legalised).
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