#303: How Hotel Maintenance Impacts the Guest & the Bottom Line | with Chris Zach

The Modern Hotelier #303: How Hotel Maintenance Impacts the Guest & the Bottom Line | with Chris Zach === David Millili: Welcome to a special HITEC episode of The Modern Hotelier, hospitality's most engaged podcast. Please make sure to follow, like, and subscribe, and let us know in the comments what you think about today's episode. Steve, who do we have on the program? Steve Carran: Yeah, David, we are sitting down with Chris Zach, the Senior Director of Product Marketing from ServiceChannel.

Chris Zach: Hi, guys. Steve Carran: Thanks for sitting down with us. How we doing today? Chris Zach: Thanks for having me.

Doing great. Steve Carran: Good. So for those that are listening and watching that might not be familiar with ServiceChannel, can you tell us a little bit about what you guys do? Chris Zach: Absolutely.

So ServiceChannel is the platform for facilities management that handles the external vendor side of the equation. So when you need to go outside to get the job done and work with a contractor, we help source them, dispatch the work to them, track its status, check the invoice, approve it, get them paid. So from beginning to end, that's what ServiceChannel does, and we do that for over 650 customers with over 31 million work orders per year running through the platform like that.

We also have a marketplace with over 70,000 providers that you can come choose from and find the best performing option for every trade in your facility anywhere in the US. David Millili: Let's talk about the operator's world and what's going wrong day to day for hotel management companies. Chris Zach: Yeah, so you think about what the operator needs to do when it comes to maintaining the condition of the property. There isn't engineering staff on site, right?

But as you get down into select service hotels, they are really operating lean. They might just have one engineer on site, and there's also a lot of difficulty hiring the engineering talent that is needed in today's market. So it's difficult to get good people in-house, and that's why there's an increasing reliance on vendors to augment the engineering team and ensure that the property is guest ready every day. Labor rates are jumping over 5% per year with inflation, so there's also that kind of a cost spiral here, and operators are trying to figure out how to protect margin.

And they spend often 3 to 5% of their revenue on maintenance, so it's not the biggest cost line item, but when you look at the cost and you think about also the impact on their ratings and their reviews and how that ultimately trickles down into their RevPAR, it's a big challenge that they face. Steve Carran: So you also work with owners and asset managers. Is this a problem for them as well? Chris Zach: Yeah, and as you can imagine, if your guest scores are going down and if your RevPAR is going down, the property's becoming less valuable, that's a big problem for the owner.

So in the short term, it's about ensuring maximum revenue potential and protecting revenue, not losing or having to refund a big event because the water heater broke down and twenty-five percent refund on a corporate event. In the longer term, it's about asset protection and capital asset planning. So do they have the data that they need about the health of their location and the major equipment in it, and do they know when they're gonna need to replace it so they can have a ten-year capital plan that's really well informed by the reality of their facility?

David Millili: So what is the actual value and change for a hotel that adopts your platform? Chris Zach: Well, it starts with guest experience because ultimately, the faster they can resolve a problem that gets reported that's impacting guest experience, the less time there is for bad experience to translate into poor loyalty, less likelihood to return, and a poor review. Of course, that's tied to the revenue that they protect, less room refunds or out of order kitchen equipment, for example, that can bring down the restaurant for a night.

There's the cost control angle I talked about, ensuring that every job that gets done has a trail to ensure that you're paying the right labor rates, the right labor hours, the right material markup, and costs aren't spiraling out of control, and you can hold those vendors accountable. And then there's just the sheer scale that some of these operators are working at. When they have hundreds of properties with thousands of different vendors they need to keep track of, it can be a nightmare if you're trying to do that by phone and email.

So just bringing that chaos under control allows that team to be more strategic and think about less firefighting, more thinking ahead. Do we have preventive maintenance in place? Do we have a proactive brand standards protection program and the things that are really gonna make a difference? Steve Carran: So everybody here is talking about AI.

How does AI fit into ServiceChannel? Chris Zach: Yeah. So AI, we're weaving it into the platform and throughout the workflow. So first of all, we believe that to really have an impact day to day, AI needs to meet you where you already are and where you're doing the work and not be another tool or another dashboard layered on top, 'cause no one has time for that.

So woven in from the beginning, right when somebody needs to report a problem, AI can help them figure out, hey, what trade is the problem? How urgent is that problem? And meet somebody who's not trained in facilities or engineering where they are, help them, guide them to creating something that's accurate and it's gonna get resolved quickly. Later on in the life cycle, AI is helping to remind the operator and their vendors what's the most important thing they should be worried about.

If they have hundreds of open work orders, it can be just a lot of noise, and you could be missing the thing that's having the most guest impact. So AI can raise that up to the top and say, "Hey, keep your eyes on this particular clogged sink," for example, because that guest is really important and need to get on that one. And so from beginning to end, it's woven into the things that these facilities teams are already doing, but helping them do that more scalably and streamlined.

And again, that allows that team to get beyond firefighting and operate from a more strategic posture. David Millili: So the hotel's tech stack is just getting larger and larger, so how do you fit into the hotel's tech stack? Chris Zach: First of all, our posture is to integrate with what they have because we think it works best when these workflows are seamless. So if they have a hotel operations system today that's working for them, their engineers are getting work orders in that system, their housekeeping is keeping track of room cleans in that system, we can layer right on top of it, integrate with that system, and when the work needs to go out of house, it just syncs seamlessly into ServiceChannel, and we handle it, and we send back, "Here's how much it costs," and it's done, the status.

If they don't have that in place, we can just serve the entire maintenance function within ServiceChannel, and we do that for several brands today, including a very large extended stay brand that uses us for everything. So whether that's an internal team work order or it needs to go to a plumbing, HVAC, electrical contractor, it can be entirely in ServiceChannel. And also visibility to the asset portfolio, so how healthy are your pumps, your spa equipment, your walk-in freezer?

When are you gonna need to replace it? Keep that source of truth in ServiceChannel as well. David Millili: Well, that does it for another episode of The Modern Hotelier. This is where you get to let everyone know how they can get in touch with you, find out more about ServiceChannel, and also what's next.

Chris Zach: Absolutely. So you can learn about us at servicechannel.com. Follow us on LinkedIn to see the conversation we're in, and come talk to us if you'd like to find out, you know, how does our vendor network compare to our peers today?

Are we working with the best, or do we have a big opportunity to upgrade? We do that kind of analysis for customers all the time, so we can walk you through the numbers and help you understand the opportunity. David Millili: Okay, great. Well, that does it for this special HITEC episode of The Modern Hotelier, the most engaged podcast in hospitality.

Whether you're watching or listening, we appreciate you and hope to be with you again soon. Thank you. Steve Carran: Thank you.