Butler Hospitality Tech Suite
Industry Context
Most hotels lose money on their food & beverage operations. This has led many hotel operators and chains to shift to lower-cost “grab & go” meal solutions and the elimination of room service as an expected amenity of a guest’s stay. As a third party provider of room service, Butler sought to offset F&B costs for hotels aiming to return to a more comprehensive guest experience.
Challenge
In providing a turn-key F&B solution for hotels, Butler chose to take on the deluge of challenges inherent to providing room service:
Order accuracy
Meal quality
Expedited delivery time
Staff management
Solutions
Our product team’s overarching objective was building solutions to support the high-touch operations it would take to offer room service at scale. In order to accommodate our variety of users — guests, customer support, kitchen and delivery staff — we designed a network of interconnected applications and systems.
A guest ordering web app
An order management system (a mission control for all orders & staff)
Expeditor app (order tracking and delivery assignment)
Butler Guest App Experience
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In building Butler’s brand awareness among hotel guests, we had to identify and leverage the physical & digital touch points across the guest journey: what types of activations were required to win a guest’s attention? And once we won their interest, how do we make ordering as easy as possible?
To lower the lift for the user, Butler’s ordering experience was built as a web app that could be opened on any browser type (with no application download required). Keycard inserts and in-room signage featured QR codes that would place guests directly into an ordering flow (with their specific hotel information) on their device’s default browser. -
Were users confident that their room service order was being delivered to the correct hotel?
Were users clear what food options were available to them at any given time?
Another challenge we had to consider about the guest experience was how to communicate important information (i.e. hotel name, delivery time, meal period etc) to a potentially weary traveler who just checked into their hotel. We employed various UI strategies to create a “sense of place” in our web app experience. Typography settings, color highlights, and a stacked header navigation (that collapsed on scroll for mobile) allowed us to communicate critical information while preserving vertical real estate for transactional items. -
In order to preserve as much vertical real estate as possible for food options, we came up with an Action Bar component to house secondary features (food filters, adding vouchers).
Order Management System
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Butler’s Order Management System was an inherited digital product that underwent a variety of feature improvements and enhancements.
Core features included:
- Order Intake
- Order Edit/Cancellation
- Payment Processing
- Staff Management
- Menu Creation
- Report Generation
Expediter App
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Butler operated under a “Hub & Spoke” model — which in practice meant that Butler would lease out under-utilized hotel kitchens, and prepare orders for hotels within a certain delivery radius. This created the need for an Expediter role to check orders and assign them strategically to delivery people (referred to as Butlers). Towards the end of my tenure at Butler, we tested out an AI model that would automate the delivery assignment based off of the Butler’s location in the city