Software for hospitality management and front-of-house service providers

A hospitality management provider has to prove the quality of its front desk service to its client every month. The right software turns what agents log at the desk (visitors, parcels, loans, calls, the desk logbook) into service KPIs, a daily report and a monthly dashboard, with no retyping in the evening, across one site or several.

Why does a front-of-house service provider need a desk tool?

In France, hospitality management is first and foremost a service business: teams trained in the codes of the hotel trade, placed in office buildings. According to job advertisements in the sector, compiled in our front desk market overview, the hospitality manager handles face-to-face and telephone reception; mail, parcels, couriers and badges; daily quality rounds; team supervision; and daily reporting of events, backed by a monthly dashboard for the client.

That reporting is often pieced together by hand, from a notebook, a spreadsheet and emails. The same overview makes the point: no player clearly connects the provider’s dashboard, the KPIs the client expects and the data in the front desk software. Tenant experience platforms, for their part, ignore the front desk agent’s internal tasks, the very ones the provider has to justify.

Which service KPIs can you track?

The SmartCraft Building principle: every action is logged once, at the desk, and the contract’s KPIs are calculated from those entries.

KPI	Where the data comes from	What it shows the client
Visitor response time	Arrival time and host notification	How responsive the front desk is
Volumes per time slot, peak periods	Visitor log	Whether the team is sized for the actual workload
Mail and parcels received, waiting, handed over	Mail and parcels log, tracked hand-over	How reliable the mail chain is
Loans in progress and overdue loans	Log of key, badge and equipment loans	How well losses and reminders are controlled
Calls handled	Call log	The telephone workload absorbed
Rounds completed, events recorded	Desk logbook	Quality monitoring and incident traceability

Reports can be broken down by period, site, front desk, host or company, and exported to PDF, CSV or Excel.

How do you produce the daily report without retyping?

The digital desk logbook is the thread of the day: every entry is time-stamped, signed by the agent, categorised (incident, instruction, information, task) and can no longer be changed once validated; corrections remain visible in the history. Add the visitor, parcel, loan and call logs, and the day’s report is already written.

In practice, the typical day we are designing ends like this: at 19:00, the day’s report goes to the provider and feeds the monthly dashboard. Nobody has opened a spreadsheet.

What does the client’s monthly dashboard contain?

The same figures as the provider’s. That is the crux: facility managers and property managers see KPIs drawn from what the desk logged. The monthly report is no longer a statement; it is an extract.

• Scheduled reports sent by email, weekly or monthly.
• Views and filters saved per user, so each contact finds their own KPIs.
• Role-based permissions: the provider’s agents log activity at the desk, the client reviews. Everyone sees what their role allows, and nothing else.

At a contract review, the discussion is then about shared facts rather than two versions of the same month.

How do you secure the shift handover between teams?

A front desk staffed from 07:00 to 19:00, sometimes overnight, changes team several times a day. That is when an instruction, a bulky parcel or a key to be collected goes missing.

Handover mode displays a screen at the start of each shift summing up instructions, tasks in progress, parcels waiting and expected visitors. Handover instructions distinguish what is to be done, to be watched and to be passed on. Loans that reach their due time trigger an automatic reminder and an alert in the desk logbook: the next team inherits an up-to-date situation, not a sticky note.

It is also an argument in front of the client: continuity of service can be demonstrated, entry by entry.

How do you manage several sites and several front desks?

A provider often operates several buildings, and sometimes several front desks within the same building.

• Several front desks per building, with a visitor or parcel transferable from one to another.
• A hierarchy of organisation, sites, buildings and front desks, with settings that are inherited and can be adjusted locally: invitation and badge templates, instructions.
• Multi-site consolidation of KPIs, and fine-grained permissions per module and per site.
• Licence per building: several reception desks at the same address count as a single licence, with no fees per visitor or per agent. Details are on the pricing page.

The visitor journey (invitation from the calendar, QR code, kiosk, host notification) is described on our visitor management software page.

What the tool does not do, and where it stands

In fairness to your teams and to your clients:

• SmartCraft Building is in its pre-launch phase. The durations quoted, such as under an hour for a front desk team to get up to speed or under 30 seconds between an expected visitor’s arrival and their host being notified, are design targets, to be measured with the first pilot sites.
• The first version does not include room and desk booking, catering management, direct control of entry gates, or billing services to tenants.
• Essential and Premium prices will be public at launch; the Security and enterprise tier is on quotation.

How do you assess the tool against your contract?

The most useful starting point is a real site: how many visitors, how many parcels, who runs the desk, and above all what your client expects every month. Bring your latest monthly report; together we will look at what it would become if it were drawn directly from what the desk logs.

Hosting options, SaaS in France or elsewhere in Europe or an on-premises appliance, are described in the deployment section. To talk it through: book a demo.