Building a Culture Centered Around Customers

Welcome to Otelier, the hospitality software behind every great host! 

While the unification of several best-in-class hospitality solutions over the past couple years has been a tremendous undertaking by so many people across our organization, in reality the process began and ended with our customers. I wanted to take a minute to thank you, our hotelier partners, who have been with us through the ride. We’re incredibly excited to show you what’s in store for this next evolution of Otelier. 

Perhaps the most important phase of our rebrand process was research and discovery – a deep dive into the areas we solve the greatest challenges, including market research and interviews with you. We were able to take that data and inform our product strategy, bring that product strategy to life via focused development investment, and bring the entirety of the organization and our customers along.  

I like to talk often about the “Why” behind a project, and throughout this entire process – even the acquisition and integration stages – our customers have remained the centerpiece of our Why.  

At Otelier, our Why is built around helping our customers optimize their businesses so they can return to hospitality, and we do that in a couple different ways:  

• One set of products aimed at solving automation and workflow challenges, enabling hoteliers to automate many manual back office tasks, mainly in operations, accounting and finance. Anytime you have a manual process, you're going to have mistakes and you’re going to have recurring expense. The more you can automate those tasks – even automated checks and balances – the more time and money you’re going to save. 
  
  
• Another set of solutions are built to inform decision making starting and is commonly referred to as Corporate Performance Management (CPM). CPM is really about planning – forecasting, budgeting – and adding business intelligence to inform decision-making. This is a circular function, meaning your reporting will inform your dynamic forecast, which will allow you to further optimize your strategy, for example.  

Together, our solutions enable Otelier to deliver against our greater purpose: Help our hotel partners make smarter, data-driven decisions, and return to hospitality. We want our customers to stop worrying about data – getting data into the right places, in the right formats, at the right time – and instead be able to make effective decisions quickly. This allows you to get back to providing exceptional hospitality, which is what we know you really want to do. 

Customer-Centric Culture 

A big part of unifying several new companies is creating a singular culture among them. At Otelier, our culture is centered around empathy and people – both customers and employees.   

Otelier employees put themselves in your shoes, which allows them to focus on helping to make you successful.  

For example, when a night auditor tells us that she has time to focus on more valuable tasks because reporting has been automated, that’s a win for our customer and a win for us. Or when a revenue manager finds that her property is underperforming in a certain market and tweaks the strategy to gain market share, that’s a win for the customer and a win for us.  

Our employees get excited about our customer's positive outcomes; and if they’re not having positive outcomes, we know we need to do something better. 

Accountability is built directly into Otelier’s core values, which are:  

• Innovation: We are rigorous in the continuous evolution of our software, committed to excellence in everything we do, harnessing our curiosity to create the new.  
• Connection: We work hard to become more than just suppliers to our customers. By taking time to understand our customers’ business and craft impactful solutions, we empathize with their challenges, becoming valued partners.  
• Accountability: We stand by our products and service, and the promises we make to our customers, constantly pushing boundaries to keep them ahead of the game.  
• Joy: By saving time and money through automating the mundane, we enable hoteliers to get back to hospitality.  

The Otelier brand and product strategy were carefully crafted to reflect a culture centered around the customer. If you want to know even more about the “Why” behind it, check out a recent podcast conversation I had with Josiah Mackenzie of Hospitality Daily. We hope Otelier strikes you as meaningful and engaging. We aren’t done: In the coming months, you will see more new features and perhaps a new product or two as well.  

We look forward to meeting you out on the event circuit this year. Next month, I’ll be at the Hunter Hotel Investment Conference in Atlanta – where we recently opened a new office – and you can book some time with me here. Along with the rest of the team, we are excited to show you what we’ve built: The hospitality software behind every great host.