RedDoorz + Zendesk: Streamlining, scaling, and thriving

When a company achieves its best revenue performance, it’s a huge milestone. But to do so during a time of massive change, in an industry that revolves around travel—now that’s a feat of its own. And that’s exactly what RedDoorz, a budget hotel chain based in Southeast Asia, was able to do.

With more than 1,800 hotels across 100+ cities, RedDoorz is one of Southeast Asia’s largest and fastest growing technology-driven hotel management and booking platforms. Through the RedDoorz brand network, the company also helps its hotel partners manage distribution, pricing, marketing, customer experience, and technology tools.

Implementing new technology to stay agile

The nature of RedDoorz’s business centers around the customer experience. Yet the company’s support system made it hard for its employees to deliver the best experience possible. Agents used multiple applications to complete simple support tasks, manual reporting added even more to the growing workload, and a lack of comprehensive data made it a struggle to track performance and productivity.

When COVID-19 hit, RedDoorz’s existing support tool couldn’t keep up. The company began looking for something that could be rolled out quickly and enable it to become more dynamic and self-sufficient to meet the changing landscape.

In a time of rising demand and uncertain economic trends, the company saw an opportunity with Zendesk to add features such as live chat, email and social media integration, rich data, and analytics to improve both its customer and employee experience. Whereas the company initially anticipated the need to hire an additional 60 agents to meet demand, RedDoorz soon discovered that with the right resources, its team of 90 could handle the increasing workload and deliver a more positive, streamlined customer experience with ease.

An urgent need for omnichannel support

Prior to Zendesk, RedDoorz’s support team used a non-omnichannel platform to manage its customer and partner interactions, including WhatsApp for mobile messaging. However, with no live chat tool, manual reporting, a lack of dashboards, and limited integrations, the company’s growing demands became a challenge. And with agents using separate applications for chat, calls, and emails, the company found it difficult to increase efficiency.

With the pandemic, people started traveling less, but that meant a sudden increase in cancellation requests and booking modifications. Without the resources to hire the estimated 60 agents RedDoorz would need and ticket volume increasing 100 percent at the start of the pandemic, it was clear something needed to change, and fast. The need for an omnichannel solution to streamline support communication and organize crucial customer information became clear.

Having been a support agent for much of her career, Tia Dini, associate vice president of customer service at RedDoorz, understood the importance of the agent experience and its impact on the overall customer experience. “The most important thing was for the tool to be user friendly for our customers and team,” Dini said. “We knew if it were user friendly, especially for our team, it would also support them in handling our customers and property partners more efficiently.”

Quick implementation for quick results

In summer 2020, RedDoorz made the move to Zendesk, implementing Chat, Support, and Talk for its customer and hotel support teams. Crucially, the company was also able to integrate its back-end hotel management system along with WhatsApp into Sunshine Conversations, giving agents much-needed visibility and boosting productivity. Within two months of implementation the company began to see improvements.

“We feel fully supported by the Zendesk team.”Tia Dini, Associate Vice President, Customer Service at RedDoorzDini led the Zendesk implementation at the company and has since been able to make changes and adapt the platform to the business’s needs herself. “When we first implemented Zendesk everyone was working from home. It was quite challenging to train people remotely, but because the user interface is friendly, our agents were able to easily understand how to utilize Zendesk,” Dini said. “The number of interactions continued to increase but because of our move to Zendesk, we were able to ensure productivity and quick response times.”

For the first time ever, the support team had an omnichannel platform and a centralized location to access customer information and comprehensive data. Dini could also analyze performance, productivity, and areas of improvement easily without the need for manual reporting—all tasks that had previously been challenging and time-consuming.

With a newly automated workflow, the RedDoorz team watched its productivity skyrocket 100 percent, first response time shrink by 86 percent, and its CSAT score hit well above the industry benchmark. RedDoorz’s agents also gained access to their own performance data through Zendesk, which added a level of transparency the company previously couldn’t provide. With over 50,000 tickets per month and only 90 agents, those metrics reflect the deep impact Zendesk’s support tools have had on the RedDoorz team.

Scaling beyond the challenges of 2020

RedDoorz’s partnership with Zendesk has enabled the hotel management chain to not only survive 2020 and the impact of COVID-19 but to thrive during it. The company’s third quarter—which came shortly after implementing Zendesk—was its strongest revenue performance yet. And that’s only the beginning for the company.

Dini continues to meet with her Zendesk account team monthly to discuss ways to enhance the platform’s use and explore all its features. “We feel fully supported by the Zendesk team,” Dini said. “They continuously provide us with insight and advise us on how to improve and make our service better.”

As RedDoorz continues to scale, moving into countries such as Vietnam and the Philippines, it is looking ahead for ways to continue improving customer trust, retention, and satisfaction. The company is planning to roll out the Customer Love Program, a further investment in customer service that would add voicebots, chatbots, surveys, and a knowledge base built on Zendesk Guide.