Forum Discussion
Front Desk (Firstline Workers) in Hospitality Industry
Looking for advice on this. Our organization and a partner of ours supports a number of businesses in the hospitality industry, specifically Country Clubs. While most roles in these organizations are straightforward, I am struggling to adequately address how to deal with Firstline Workers at reception positions. Here is the most extreme case.
The organization has 4 points of entry, all staffed, all on rotation. Two are staffed by one, one by two and the main by up to five at any given time. The main reception is the pain point. It has four PCs and four phones (Currently Polycom CCX600s).
As configured, the main reception uses a shared account licensed with M365 E5. You can assume all the problems of four PCs/phones sharing the same calling line, Teams account, Mailbox Etc. To resolve some of the chaos, the key team members were given their own accounts, and now most login to their assigned PC in Browser (inPrivate), to access their dedicated mailbox.
Last week, we endeavored to create user accounts for all of the other workers (12+), assigning M365 F3, with the intent of allowing direct logins to the reception PCs and changing the Polycoms out for Yealink MP50 USB handsets. The idea worked perfect in the lab, because my team was logging in with our E5 accounts w/Calling plans...
Headed out to the field and discovered we should have read the fine print...
So my question in short, is how should I deal with this scenario. It's not practical for me to be paying for E3/5 plans for hourly workers who are answering calls and checking people in/out. These are the equivalent roles to those addressed by F3, but instead of devices, they are working of glorified Kiosks (and need to be). I think the a more direct question is how do organizations in other industries handle inbound calling to firstline workers. Is the assumption that all calls are routed to more "fully" licensed users? How do you get to somebody "on the floor"?
Thoughts?
- Firstly, I advise you to check this with the Microsoft in your country and like you said licensing is per user. One way would be switching to on-premise solution , where you don't have licensing limitation or like hybrid model with Azure, and like having on-premise exchange but you will lose access to cloud solutions like Microsoft Teams.
Another way would be assigning four license and it be share and instead of adding the name, then add like REC-PC-1, REC-PC-2 and they use share license , having this you would only have four license but auditing would be difficult because it would be hard to see who has been using the device. It is like you have four phones and it is shared , so anyone could response.
