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At Hotel Engine, customer obsession is in our DNA.
Literally. We base our company, our culture, and our daily grind on 11 traits, which we call our DNA. Our very first one? “Customer Obsessed. We’re 100% committed to our customers.” Everything we do “is designed to create value for our customers and deserve their trust.”
It shows in the way we’ve developed our booking platform, and in the way we’ve always supported our customers — but it especially shows in the way we’ve changed over time to support them better.
Since January of 2021 we’ve completely overhauled our Client Operationsdepartment, reorganizing from the ground up to provide best-in-class support despite exponential growth. And we’ve drastically improved our key performance metrics along the way.
In 2020, Our Project Services team provided white-glove support to large groups and disaster relief organizations during Covid (finding healthcare workers accommodations so they didn’t have to risk going home). Our customer base grew to 450K, and our US-based Member Support team provided 24/7 service via phone, email, and chat.
We were also leading the industry for smooth check-ins. Only around 2% of our reservations experienced issues at check-in, versus the industry standard of 10%.
But we continued to push ourselves, knowing we could find even more ways to improve our customer experience. So in 2021 and 2022, we reinvented ourselves to significantly improve Client Operations efforts.
We added a new team to the Client Operations department, Traveler Experience, to study common check-in issues that dampened our customer’s experience. By investigating common problems, we were able to institute proactive solutions within Member Support, and reduced check-in issues to only 1% of bookings by the end of 2022.
Next, Member Support split every case type into one of three tiers:
- Tier 1: Non-urgent cases, like receipt requests, suitable for new agents
- Tier 2: More challenging cases, more timely, for experienced support specialists
- Tier 3: Urgent and/or challenging cases, like check-in issues
By separating the tiers, Client Operations was able to grow to meet increasing demand. Where new hire training used to take four weeks and cover every possible kind of case, new agents could now be onboarded to respond to Tier 1 cases in just a few days.
Once onboarded, Tier 1 agents are trained further before moving into Tier 2, and so on. By assigning staff this way according to their experience, we ensure every case receives thorough, knowledgeable support.
With training and hiring simplified, Member Support was able to grow quickly: 15 to 60 agents and counting — and the overnight team has more than tripled.
In the second half of 2022 we took this further and added a 4th Tier to Member Support, specifically for Project Services Support cases.
Project Services Support (PSS) had previously been a part of a different department, separate from Client Operations. This meant that PSS had limited staff, and could only respond to cases during business hours. Outside of those hours, Member Support stepped in — but lacked the same personal relationship and case details required to provide the best experience for these customers and their complicated bookings.
By integrating PSS into Member Support in 2022 and staffing Tier 4 with only the highest-trained agents, we now ensure that every Project Services customer — including disaster relief efforts and other large groups — gets high quality service 24/7 and 365.
By January 2023:
- The average resolution times for all cases reduced by 79% despite a 188% growth in bookings.
- All urgent cases were resolved in under 30 minutes, 24/7.
- Altogether, Member Support resolved 392% more cases in 2022 than in 2020.
We changed because our community genuinely cares. And now customer obsession is not just in Hotel Engine's DNA — it’s in everything we do.
Nomination Title: From Customer Obsession to Complete Reinvention
