Outsourcing Reservations While Staying on Brand: What You Need to Know

In the fast-paced modern world that we’re living in, outsourcing as much of your hospitality enterprise as possible makes a great deal of sense. Tasks like bookings and other reservation-related matters are important, yes – but they also take away the valuable time of your in-house employees that could be better spent attending to guests’ needs.

At the same time, you don’t want outsourcing to translate into a cold and otherwise generic guest experience. You want to maintain the high-quality brand you’ve worked so hard to build. The good news is that this is possible, provided you keep a few key things in mind along the way.

The Importance of Investment

First, it requires buy-in from you. You need to put a premium on what matters most to your business: your unique experience. How does your brand translate into the words, tone, and general vibe when someone calls to make a reservation? When a potential customer reaches out, they need more than just to have a basic function performed. The chances are high that they can do the same thing via their web browser without talking to a living, breathing human. When they choose to pick up the phone it matters how that call is handled.

The Intricacies of Outsourcing Reservations and Branding: Breaking Things Down

Outsourcing reservations to a generic BPO and outsourcing reservations to a trusted and trained team of professionals are two different things and should be treated as such.

There are a lot of organizations out there that offer outsourcing services in a very basic, literal sense. Normally, this means they give you access to people working in a call center somewhere who may not have ever worked in the hospitality field, may have never had any substantive customer service training, and may not speak English well enough to handle the tasks required, much less represent your brand.

The right partner, on the other hand, will ensure that agents are trained on hospitality-specific customer service best practices. They will also want to become experts in your brand before they even begin the job. Further, your best bet is to find a company that employs native English speakers with pleasant and easy-to-understand accents.  

When searching for such a partner, you’ll also want to make sure you are teaming up with an organization that can do more than just answer the phone whenever someone calls. The right outsourcing partner will be motivated to increase your reservation conversion rate. This can help make sure that your hotel is always full, even in the off-season or during periods of the year when it otherwise would not have been in the past.

Customers want a friendly representative from your business who will take the time to listen to what they have to say, who will talk through various elements of the trip with them, and may even offer personalized recommendations like restaurants to eat at or points of interest to visit during their time away from home. Maintaining your voice during all this is critical; that is exactly what the right outsourcing partner helps you accomplish.

Tyme Global: Your Premier Outsourcing Partner

At Tyme Global, we understand how important developing your brand is for hotels. It isn’t enough to ensure reservations “get done.” They require care and attention to detail to engage potential guests. Happy callers turn into bookings. Tyme Global embraces all the aforementioned factors: we provide in-depth training to all agents, ensure language proficiency/clarity, and embrace your brand voice as part of our onboarding. This combination leads to higher conversions and better customer retention.

If you would like to find out more about staying on brand while outsourcing reservations or would like to find out more about how Tyme Global can help you, contact our team today.