Despite the ending of lockdowns and the return to healthy occupancy numbers for many properties, ownership is still reluctant to bring back the whole senior team. There are several reasons for this, from automation implemented during the pandemic to still-depressed cash flows; regardless of underlying explanations, the result is that the lean teams and skeleton crews are here to stay.This means lots more work for those managers that are still around. With all the new responsibilities, their inboxes are likely overflowing, while they personally bounce from meeting to meeting without the time to reflect on real projects that will actually move the needle.
In Cal Newport’s 2016 nonfiction book ‘Deep Work’, he describes this type of activity as ‘shallow work’ which gives the appearance of being busy without accomplishing anything truly meaningful. Think answering emails, attending meetings where your presence is more observer than contributor, sifting through conversation threads to pull up necessary information or practically any form of multitasking.
Our fear is that, with the added responsibilities for those senior executives operating in a lean organizational structure, hoteliers no longer have time to give any prolonged attention to serious tasks and effectively align their properties for the decade ahead.
While this is undoubtedly a problem that’s far broader than what a payment platform can resolve, our hope is that the installation of TransForm can help to chip away at this issue and free up your managers’ time so that they can dedicate more of it to addressing some of the big challenges ahead.
Three of the key ways that TransForm can help free your team’s time include:
- Increase payment processing efficiency. With TransForm, you no longer have to set aside time to speak to guests over the phone, coordinate a good time to call them or bounce in and out of an endless email chain to procure the necessary credit card details. Once you have the final bill amount, you email it, and then the guest authorizes it on their own time.
- Automated reminder and past due notifications. Say a guest wants to pay in installments or is late on a payment. Rather than having to keep a mental log of when all subsequent payments are due, TransForm can send out automatic reminders to the customer as well as completed transaction notifications to a manager. Besides only labor savings, this frees up mental restraints because team members don’t have to devote energy to remember who owes what.
- Dealing with the chargeback problem. Another big time drain on knowledge workers within your organization is dealing with credit card payment disputes. Besides reimbursing the actual amount, the accounting team also has to spend time preparing ‘representment’ or the documentation to state the hotel’s case as to why a guest is ineligible for said refund. Because of TransForm full PCI compliance and tokenization of data so that no hotelier ever sees the full credit card deals, it helps to minimize chargebacks altogether, meaning less time overall devoted to representment.
There are a few smaller points to be made in favor of TransForm helping automate payment processes and thus playing a part in this shallow work issue. If you think your team may be suffering from this problem, reach out which your specific concerns and we’ll gladly show you how we can help.
