Streamline your sales automation process for Hospitality

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I think we all know the delight of realizing that we can take care of something ourselves when we expected that we had to wait in an exhausted queue to be able to get it done. Probably, or hopefully a lot of you experienced this self-service in your travels to be here today and maybe some of the frustrations when it's not there. Our next organization has really designed their whole business around the idea of putting self-service at the forefront of travel. They are the leading European fully digital boutique apartment operator, and they are redefining travel with a blend of technology and a soulful touch. Having digitized 80% of their internal processes. And it's with this mindset that they implemented their Boost virtual agent earlier this year where they looked at how can push conversational AI beyond just being a reactive source of answers to being a proactive concierge using our WhatsApp integration and then give personalized answers to customers, using API connections to a variety of different business systems that they have. I've had a really an up close look at this process and it has not been without work, but we are very excited to see the outcome of this project and the level of automation and customer satisfaction that they're able to achieve. But just like the fine folks at NUMA have seen my face way too many times during the implementation, you've heard enough for me on this, so I'm going to pass it over to Eva from Numa, who's going to talk about how they are disrupting the hospitality space. Thanks. Oh. Oh, hi. Thank you very much. That was a short introduction as well of who we are. You just heard from McKenzie. You will you were here. Stories from people, great stories in other industries. Let me take you to a completely different industry, hospitality. Numa is a hospitality tech company from Berlin, Germany. And with the great introduction that Claire just gave you, you have a little idea already of what we're doing. Our big, big, big goal is to digitalize hospitality. Hospitality has been around for such a long time. It is very, very well known. Pretty much everybody has been a guest in a hotel once, at least in his life, and we are one to make sure that these kind of things are getting better, faster and nicer for each and every guest around the world. With the help of technology. So before I start going into what we do and what the guest experience department is doing and how we work with Boost, just a little introduction of myself. My name is Ava. I am the director of guest experience at Noma. My department is in charge of everything that goes and comes with guests. So from talking to guests, interacting with guests physically, which we don't do, but physically over a text message, over phone to everything that is on a digital part of it, and the digital revolution really that is in our hands. Numa, Per say, is a boutique hotel, a room, a boutique apartment provider. We are currently in eight countries in Europe and what we do is we have so-called staff less hotels. That sounds kind of weird, but it is actually quite nice because our approach was back in 2019 when we were founded, we sat together and said, What is the most painful part of each travel of when you come to a hotel, it's mostly the check in process, right? Like you come there, you need to find the front desk, you need to queue, you need to fill out multiple forms which are printed. You need to hand over your ID and your passport and everything is kind of messy. Then you get a card and you need to find a room. So we wanted to make this way, way, way easier, but at the same time we wanted to make sure that this also works internally for us as a company. So here is a very, very short introduction and summary of what NUMA is doing. So we have boutique apartments and boutique hotel rooms which are designed not only for like a quick one or two days in a city that can be hopping as well, but also for longer stays for people who want to have a weekend getaway in a city, for people who do travel for work and want to stay there longer. But you always have the quality standard of a hotel. So we're somewhere between traditional hotels, as you know them and Airbnbs, Right? So we're somewhere there in the middle. We are in, as it says, great locations. Obviously, we're in great locations. Our focus is on a double, a triple A location. So capital cities, metropoles, like big cities where people go to for various reasons. And while all the guests do that and focus on the purpose of their travel, we're taking care of them with 100% digitalized guest experience. Before I dig deeper into that, like couple of numbers around NUMA to get you a better understanding. So as such a site like we are focusing not only on short stays but on Mitt's days, long stays, extended stays. Guests can stay with us a couple of months and they did, especially during the pandemic because most of our rooms and apartments have a kitchenette. So you can stay there for longer. You can prepare your own meals. It's a fully equipped kitchen. And our focus is really around the room design. We are having a focus on nice mattresses, great pillows, blankets, lightning, interior design. So to really make the people want to stay with us and want to choose a new man wherever they are, 90% of the entire guestroom is fully automated. That means from even before the booking process. But until the end, like until the checkout day, 90% is completely digitalized. I'm going to go into this deeper and later slide. And with that, so the next number to 65% lower operational costs, it's usually usually something that I pitch amongst my real estate people are hotel people because that is the big difference, right? If you operate a hotel with around 150 rooms, you will need to have a front office as a front office staff team of like minimum six people. If you operate 24 seven at NUMA, we're currently at around 2000 something life units. The rooms are operating and we have 30 people taking care of all the guests. 24 seven And that's enough. We have a very high occupancy rate. We had are still have an average of 85% occupancy rate throughout the entire portfolio. Also throughout the pandemic. The pandemic proved our concept because we were allowed to have our doors open for guests since it's a staff Loews Hotel, you can go there, you don't have any interaction. Still, you can get away from your own home. You can still travel for work. You still have the beauty of having your own home away from home. And the other numbers, they are kind of self-explanatory. We are obviously back start up. We raised a total of €65 million in the past three years. We're pretty young. We were founded mid 2019, currently in 30 cities, around 8 to 9 countries in Europe and have around, as I just said, around 2000 something units. Life plan to be a little bit over 3000 actually by the end of this year and around 280 employees across the globe. So and here you see what makes us different from other hotel operators. This is the guests journey, obviously broken down, but this is the fully automated process that we have. Right. So it starts with your room being ready for the reservation. It starts obviously with with booking online, but that happens for most of the hotels at this point. You book your your rooms online. That is very straightforward and you get automated messages, so you fill out everything online already. So there is no need to hand out any passport, ID or whatever or fill out chunky paperwork By the time of your arrival. You do this online. It's very similar to what airlines do, right? We call it check in as well. Digital check in, you scan your ID, that's it. You're all set. We have a smart room assigned an algorithm. That's something that we establish ourselves. So our internal tech team took care of that to make sure that all the rooms in all the properties are being assigned as smart as possible to make sure that we drive more revenue but still have enough time to maintain rooms, clean rooms, making sure that every guest gets the best experience possible. It goes over to automated payments, also automated invoice sending to the gas communication, something I will dig deeper into a little further down the road. So as I said, we're completely digital at communicating with the guests. 24 seven and you can manage your own trip. So next to having a digital guest experience team that helps you with anything you need. We want to empower the guests to help themselves because this most of the time is quicker and more convenient for the guest within our own trip manager, which we now call my trips just very recently, you can extend your stay without needing the help of anyone else. You can shorten your stay, you can book another stay, you can ask for a late checkout, you can ask for an early check in. You can do everything in there without any help from anybody else. We also have our own housekeeping app. We designed our own housekeeping app that is kind of like our way to communicate with all the housekeeping companies that we work with. So we have third party housekeeping teams in a million different countries and cities, really. So we needed to have a structured standardized way to talk to them, especially because they're a staff turnover is relatively high as well, right? So we needed to make sure that tasks are being done, rooms are being cleaned on time, they need to be spotless. There is some maintenance like smaller maintenance things that housekeeper can also fix. This is our solution to that. And the guest experience department communicates with the housekeeping team there as well. And here you see the contact list guest experience journey. So as I said, everything can be done at the palm of your hand, your phone. It gives you the opportunity to book design and enhance your stay at every given stage, at every given point in time. Obviously, you book online. That goes for pretty much all the property, all the hotels you do you to the check in, which is very, very easy to do. You either fill it out manually or you scan your passport or your ID done. You do pay online as well and then everything is settled at the day you check in, you receive your PIN code that lets you into the building and into your room, and you also receive any other help that you need. Interesting things to know, like what can you do in different city recommendations? Concierge service that we were talking about. You have smart home controls there as well. And there we have a trip manager. As I said, the trip manager, as I just explained, is or has been the only agent or virtual assistant that we had. So it was it's going to be an app very soon to. So a place for the guests, right? The guests have an account there. They can sign up. They can do everything there, as I just explained. And then after that you have the opportunity to download your invoice yourself. You can send it to whoever. That's very convenient also for corporate guests, because they can send it to their accounting department, they can download it for themselves, they can do whatever, everything at the palm of your hand. And whenever you need assistance, there is a guest experience team and you don't need to leave the room, walk down to the front desk, wait until it's your turn. You don't even need to be physically in the hotel to get assistance. So that is a little glimpse into how we work. As I said, everything works with your phone. You can get to us and get help 24 seven in your native language or in a native language. And the from the countries that we're in. That has also been the part where we said we need to have something new to help our guests experience agents get better, get faster and also have consistent communication towards the guests. As I said, the team itself is not very big at this point. It's it's sturdy support agents, 50 people in the guest experience department, 30 people taking care of the communication with the guest. But we have very, very high inbound. So people talk to us mostly through WhatsApp. That's like 70, 75% of the communication and the inbound that we're getting. Obviously, there are still some people who write emails, but it's mostly WhatsApp and calls. So we said, okay, it works well. We have a pretty decent SAT like in the last 12 months we were in an average at 89%, which is super high for hotels, like the best ranked hotels this year, like in the last 12 months was Marriott and Hyatt and they have 76. So we're pretty way above that even though we don't have any staff on site. And obviously you want to maintain that, right? We're super proud of that. We want to keep that. We want to even increase that a little bit if that's possible. And we have a pretty, pretty good reply time as well because that was when I joined Numa in its very early stages in 2020. The first thing that I said because my background is in traditional hospitality, I worked in five star hotels in Austria where I'm from in France, in the United States. And my thing was if we take all of this into a digital world, we need to make sure that guests get an assistance as soon as fast and as professional as possible. Otherwise, nobody will ever believe in digital hotels. People will hate it and they will never book this again, which is bad because there is a lot of competition out there. Like people don't have to go to Numa, right? They can go to a million different other places. So this is when we said we need to reply fast and professional. So what we did in the past is we trained the team on everything so they have knowledge, tech, troubleshooting about finance, stuff about how we sell ourselves on on OTAs or on our own website, on how the marketing works on literally anything that worked while in the beginning when we had like seven or eight house properties. But at this point we're like, that's quite some some information there and quite a lot of things that people need to remember, right? However, we were always able to answer within an average of 2.9 minutes. Back to our guests. It was an actual agent who is employed by Numa, knows everything about the property and the processes and is of help. So here you see the circle, right? So it's very straightforward. Actually, the guest books are room online. It's always a starting point. Obviously the pin code gets sent automatically at the day of arrival and then you have the the option to communicate with the guest experience team or Jack's team, as we call it, through WhatsApp, through email, through chats on Booking.com or Airbnb, through Instagram, through Facebook. And all these communication gets into one tool, one same as like as for all the other customer support teams as well. And there we have the opportunity to connect with our other tools as well. So to make sure that the agents don't need to leave their their tool as much as they needed to in the past. And this is where we said we need help we need a virtual assistant that helps us tackle these hundreds of thousands of messages that are coming in because there will be even more. Our plan is to double and triple our size in the next couple of years. That consequently means that we will have more guests with more questions, with more issues, with more things they want to know, with more need for a concierge. So we did a very, very, very extensive research on that and ended up with Boost, surprisingly to tackle all the first level questions and issues. First level things are our first level problems or questions make up around 80% of the communications because guests often are just too busy or too lazy to read. So it's things like what's the check in time, What's the checkout time? Where can I park my car? What can I do for dinner tonight? These kind of things right in the beginning was nice for the agents to have like these kind of easy things to talk about, but at some point they're like, Ava, I really don't want to answer this question anymore. Like, I answered this question like a million times right now. Like, can we just do something else? So we have integrated the chat bot or the virtual assistant quite recently to make sure that this first level is being tackled so the GCS agents can focus on second level or third level things that need more time, and also making sure that the relationship between guests and NUMA is getting fostered. So here is the main reasons on on why we said we need a virtual assistant, even though the industry is not exactly designed for this. Right? So our issue was we are in a very emotional industry because people spend a lot of time in their hotel rooms. Even if it's 12 hours only it is 12 hours, right? It is their home. So that is one 80% of our guests are still time customers of Numa because we're very young. So we were a little afraid of having this digital no staff hotel concept, for starters, and then go on with and now you talk to a virtual virtual agent and Booth really let us through this entire process really well. They understand the needs that we have. They understand the level of emotional intelligence. This chat bot we call her Amma needs to have to really help us out here. So our three main reasons were, as I just sat the conversation improvement, right? We wanted to make sure that guests get their answer even faster than multiple guests at the same time can get very high professional answers as fast as possible in their language very helpful ones as well, and navigate through this through their own questions themselves without the interaction with the Guest experience team. As I just sat before, around 70% of the of the volumes come from WhatsApp. So the plan is to have the chat bot, the virtual agent to be the first thing the guests talk to and only if they escalate, they come to the team. As I also said, like focus the shift of the agents. We want to make sure that we engage the guests more. We want to build a loyal fan base. We want to have second time, third time bookers. We have. We want to have regulars who, wherever they go in Europe, they will always look for a new bar to stay in because it's not only a great interior design and great locations, but they feel home there and they feel heard and helped. And obviously scalability, we are startup. Scalability is is our main goal. This is the main focus for us. We need to make sure that we can scale with the the speed that our real estate team puts into place with coming up with more properties and bigger properties. We want to make sure that our guests also have the opportunity to grow with us in a nice way. So as I said, we just very recently introduced the virtual assistant to NUMA actually in mid-April, so we're still in our first baby steps, still making sure and seeing how that works. We started off with launching in our Spanish market mostly because we wanted to start with something where we don't have as many rooms as many units. Even though the Spanish market is our second biggest market, it is still predominantly with apartments and not hotel rooms. And in general, people communicate a little less when they book an apartment compared to when they book a hotel room. So what you see here is a first glimpse into how we work with it and how well it goes. As I said, it's just a couple of weeks and very, very fresh, very near. And you see here that even we just started we have quite a good track record here. We have quite like we increased the soft tickets, we increased the amount of where we're Amma or the virtual assistant is completely taking over for all of us. This was a very, very first rate, even for our guests. We did it. It was a black box. We didn't know if guests are okay with this, if they will. Texas straight away that they hate this and they will never book a number again because they miss the personal touch. None of that happened. Obviously. We still have guests who are a little older and who need to get used to that. But in general, the trend is positive. And this this exactly leads us one step closer to our overall goal of digital using the hospitality and the hotel sector. So on the on the left hand side of the left hand side here you see the main topics that Emma will be tackling or should be tackling. So it's, as I said, like first, first level issues. But those issues and those questions are very important for our guests to be solved in a professional manner. If we can take away all of this from the guest experience department, we make sure that we can scale. We make sure that the guests have at great experience. We can make sure that the response times even go down further down below 3 minutes by maintaining, if not increasing, No pressure here are, as said and work internally with the virtual agent very well. That's also what happens currently. The team that is in the Spanish market likes me a lot. They were suspicious at first, but they like them a lot. They now cherish her as a team member, as a very valued team member, which is way smarter than they thought it would be. And we were helpful. On the right hand side, you see some hard facts still. So as I said, we launched very recently, mid April. Until last week we had around 1100 conversations and 4100 messages. So something that we can still manage that the team that is taking care of, which is here as well to today, is still able to work with and read through and see what how is the guest working with it? How is the guest behaving? How can we adapt this to make it faster and better and easier? So and I currently live 123 rooms in apartments. Next week we will tap into a new market in the Czech market. We will launch it in Prague to see where it goes. We're currently training it on German. Our biggest market, and that's going to be the next big milestone for us to launch. Emma in Germany, our home market, our biggest market and the place where we sell the most, where we have most of our investors, most of our real estate partners to prove to them that we can take one step further with new MA and a new hotel design. Thank you.