Hospitality Note (H.note) is a web application that I built in 2013 for Cox Communications’ hospitality division in Las Vegas, Nevada. Cox Communications is the third-largest provider of cable television services in the United States. Cox is also an internet service provider in many regions throughout the US, including Las Vegas. In addition to residential internet services, Cox Communications provides and manages the in-room internet services for each and every hotel and casino in Las Vegas. All of the technical support for hospitality services is provided through a call center located in downtown Las Vegas, where Cox representatives answer calls directly from guest rooms. At the time of my engagement in mid-2013, no system was in place to record or to aggregate the particulars of phone calls or their resolutions.

By performing systems analyses and through conducting user interviews, I discovered that most support representatives were using simple text editors or even pen and paper to jot down call notes. Clearly, valuable data collection opportunities were being overlooked, much to the chagrin of managers and field technicians. To address these issues, I developed H.note as a tool for technical support representatives and their managers. H.note is a web application built with Ruby and Sinatra, accessible from any browser on the corporate network. Every time a support call is received, a service representative enters the details of that call into H.note, submitting the particulars once the issue has been resolved. The issue logs are then batched and aggregated, providing smoother shift transitions between support representatives and allowing managers to monitor call trends for regional outages and other recurring issues.