Hospitable lets property owners save time on short-term renting and helps them to provide great guest experiences by automating messages and more. It also enables them to build their own direct booking business.
Hospitable boasts some of the best customer support in the industry—it’s won them accolades from bodies like G2 Crowd and Inc. However, as the company expanded, keeping up with this high standard became difficult.
“We were growing at a pretty incredible pace,” says Ethan Brown, who leads the customer support (CS) team, noting that the company reached the Inc. 5000. “It was a constant challenge to keep up with the growth not only of the product… but just the sheer number of customers we were adding on a weekly basis.”
Easy-to-Scale Support Team
Hospitable sets their customer satisfaction target at 85%—a rating they consistently exceed.
One major factor in that success is a highly trained in-house CS team, who strive to resolve customer queries within a day of receiving them.
The other side of that success requires giving each customer an initial response within two to three hours of them logging a ticket.
Hospitable needed a frontline team to handle the latter. With some 15000 customers, their core team of just ten in-house CS agents (spread across the US, EU and APAC) would be hard-pressed to handle the sheer number of queries.
That’s where Magic came in. Executive assistants from Magic were brought on to provide initial responses and address simple queries on their own. This covered anything that could be resolved within five minutes. By doing so, they freed up the core team to focus on complex investigations.
Thanks to the frontline team’s broad knowledge of Hospitable’s products, the volume of queries reaching the core team has remained manageable. And, as a result, the company’s customer satisfaction remains remarkably high.
Fast-Learning Assistants
Ethan emphasizes how fully integrated the frontline team is: “We don’t refer to team members as being from Magic or even being assistants,” he says. Rather, he considers them an integral team at Hospitable.
To prepare the frontline team for success, new members undergo the same onboarding process as in-house CS agents. This training takes two to three weeks and involves studying product information on a Notion knowledge base. They are then tested on this information by senior team members.
Furthermore, several frontline team members specialize in a specific aspect of the product (e.g. using the software on smart devices or integrating it with Direct software).
This specialization allows the team to handle a wide range of inquiries, even ones requiring in-depth product knowledge.
Dedicated Account Management
Hospitable has previously worked with remote teams, but their collaboration with the frontline team has been particularly successful.
Ethan considers their Magic account manager’s work a big part of this: “not just finding new team members, but also managing expectations and interactions with those team members on an ongoing basis.”
Hospitable’s dedicated account manager assists in organizing and planning their roster of assistants and other aspects of the service. This includes screening new hires, integrating them into the team, and strategizing how to further expand their roster.
