OTA Insight: emphasising the service in SaaS

At OTA Insight we know that working in the hospitality industry means a high level of service is expected.

When guests stay at your hotel, the location can be perfect, the breakfast can be scrumptious, and the decor can look beautiful; but what can really frame a guest’s lasting experience is the interactions with hotel staff.

Well it’s exactly the same for us. We provide products that give insight into the actions of different compsets, maintain parity, and help you break down revenue data. But, while our tools are simple, reliable and intuitive, taking service seriously is also essential to the success of OTA Insight.

Customer care                                 

James Parsons, Global Director of Customer Success and Operations at OTA Insight, states, “a key part of our process includes service that not only enables users to see how quick and easy it is to use our products, but allows us to demonstrate our principle of unparalleled customer care.”

When a Customer Success team member has resolved a query through our in-app chat box, users are asked to rate the personal service they received through emojis, ranging from an angry face, to a face with stars or hearts for eyes - indicating total satisfaction with our service.

Across nearly 26,000 chat conversations last year, our Customer Success team received:

With the promise to respond to all queries within 5 minutes, OTA Insight has a median first response time of:

With the aim to resolve queries within an hour, our Customer Success team does so in a median time of:

James emphasises, “our team resolves issues very quickly indeed, which is crucial. If there is a question about the data, we aim to resolve it as fast as possible, so that our customers can really trust the data they see in our platform, and go on to make the right pricing decisions.”

When considering OTA Insight’s core USPs, this should surprise no one - we really do promise unparalleled customer care.

James continues: “The trust in our data comes from two pieces - super-smart systems and excellent, fast customer service. A frictionless service that mirrors the service level that hotels deliver to their customers is what we are aiming for, and will continue to push for.”

Service all round

In aiming for a seamless service, this means we utilise our great engineering team. We use Jira, issue and project tracking software, for all of our technical issues; but this doesn’t work without having the team behind it to fix the issues as they arise. We have a Support Hero who collates all of the issues before passing them out to the correct teams for action - this has been crucial in triaging the issues as they come in and making sure our response times are as quick as they can be.

The right team

As OTA Insight continues to grow, it’s important that we’re also able to scale our service along with the company. James believes we’re in a strong position to do so due to these key elements:

The right people - “We have hired primarily out of the hotel industry and are looking for those who live and breathe service. We hire not only on skillset, but passion for service, and OTA Insight culture fit. This does make it harder to hire, but is worth it,” says James.

An empowered team - Having great people is meaningless without empowering them to solve customer issues. James says, “we try very hard to give all of our people the tools they need to make quick decisions, and therefore better serve our customers. This extends to recognising when online chat is becoming frustrating for a customer and picking up the phone to resolve immediately when required.”

Great tools matter

The high level of service we provide at OTA Insight goes hand in hand with having products that are user-friendly and high performing,

In providing first-class service, we benefit from having great products on offer, such as our rate insight tool, an easy-to-use platform that takes the guesswork out of hotel room demand.

“Providing customers with such tools is only the first step. Having a team who are enthusiastic, embody service and deliver great results, is also part of who we are, and speaks to how we stand out as a SaaS company,” says James.   

Hospitality is a challenging industry with a lot of plates to keep spinning. We believe that hoteliers that deliver exceptional service deserve exceptional service. This means that OTA Insight will continue to provide a frictionless experience so our customers have one less thing to worry about in their day-to-day activities.