In order to strengthen their relationship with customers, Gastfreund, a company specialising in guest communication software for hotels, developed a new product during the Covid pandemic. This software was designed to enhance hotel operations and support staff at all levels, from reception to management and service teams.

Problem statement

❓

What kind of product will customer want to use?

1. What are the MVP features
2. How should the software look and feel
3. How can we reduce friction so that customers decide to switch
4. Identify stretch goals for product
5. How do we measure success

Solution

In-depth research and rapid product iteration

1. Detailed user personas of different types of hotels.
2. In person research with good documentation, presentation
3. Rapid In person/remote UX refinement & functional prototype testing
4. CSAT & SUS software

Hotel types

Impact: Define and profile key customer groups

Initial conversations

The CEO, CTO, and I visited 20+ existing customers, from small hotels to multi-site businesses, to understand their operational needs and determine the best software solutions for their needs.

From email client to a Slack for hotels

Impact: Designed and launched MVP of hotelboard within a year

Extensive notifications helped to track user testing

Early test version

Full version

Complete functionality of final dashboard (post MVP)

Summary

The management and (often) reception needed a system to efficiently disseminate information to both their team and guests. With rapid prototype testing based around the key flows identified such as sharing post and task lists with staff in response to guest requests before and during stay we developed a hybrid CMS tool that could integrate with email and other channels while also providing concise task lists and relevant documents to specific team members interlinking with existing product like the Digital guest directory.

What management want VS what staff actually do

Team behaviours

We asked teams from a small selection of key target customers like Hotel Jungbrunn to share what they did during a working week (5-7 days).

These included individuals from maintenance, house keeping, service and reception. Members from each team shared their daily tasks (as they did them) via WhatsApp with special attention to any delays, how severe it was (on a scale of 1-5) and why it happened. We took this information from each team and hotel, classified the type of activity and looks for patterns in how often, severe and cause of delay. This provided a fascinating overview of the way in which operations teams overlapped and communicated when trying to provide high quality service to guests throughout the day and gave us plenty of ideas of what an operations team really needed from their new software.

(Some) Key results

1. House keeping staff didn't respond to tasks list because they're mobile phones where not able to run software.
2. Reception staff were often delayed due to integrations issues with software e.g. tracking offers and confirming from OTPs for guests.
3. Maintenance and house keeping and service staff often did not share key information with reception regarding a guest or issue during the work day.
4. Mandatory guest check in forms seemed a great opportunity to onboard guests and allow for quicker communication, with direct messaging and faster response rates to questions or issues hotelboard promised to massively reduce the drag on staff time and resources.

Methods

Integrated messaging api

Impact: In clients trialing MVP boosted task interaction by 50%

To lower the barrier of entry for utilising the software we needed to allow popular messaging apps to integrate seamlessly into the feed of hotelboard, this meant building an integrations feature.

How to make this a step change?

Key contributions

Conducted in-depth user interviews and diary studies, converting large amounts of info to key findings that improved design and interactions.

Worked closely with 4 PMs and 20+ engineers to build MVP software within a year.

Rapid prototype testing with clients

Summary

Hotelboard's journey towards a fully tested MVP was well-structured and thorough. However, once we launched it, we faced challenges with selling it to our existing customers. The onboarding process for clients was costly, and there was a fear that the software may not be suitable for their specific needs, resulting in long sales cycles and high expenses.

As a sales-driven SAAS company, Gastfreund responded by adding more features for staff to showcase to potential clients. In my opinion, a better approach would have been to address the onboarding issues first and work closely with customer service to alleviate concerns and improve the product.