As a secure ecommerce platform for card-not-present guest transactions, the most palpable use case for TransForm is helping minimize chargeback losses, negative revenue, bad debt or whichever other term your hotel uses on its income statements to describe these customer refunds. Dig a little deeper and it becomes apparent that TransForm is a huge time saver.
Why care about time savings now? Well, it’s all coming to a head with the current labor shortages that have become all too common to the hospitality industry as a direct result of COVID-19, the lockdowns, the stimulus checks and all the people who have found other forms of employment. Compounding this, most hotels are on threadbare budgets, meaning that staffing up simply to handle the every day needs of running a property may quickly become unaffordable in today’s labor market.
All told, you need a variety of automation technologies to save on labor by freeing up their time to focus on the bigger issue – servicing guests. TransForm addresses this pain point, primarily by reducing the total time spent by one of your hotel’s team members to converse with the guest and process their credit card information for a charge. Moreover, coordinating payments is often an ‘interruptive’ form of busy work. This is particularly true for email-based transactions.
Suppose a guest emails your team to make a reservation and you don’t have TransForm. You then diligently email them back as soon as possible with the necessary package details and quoted price. From there, you might not get a response for several hours or several days, by which point a member of the intake team must sift through the email thread to jog their memory before responding. Then after said agent replies to the customer, again you have to wait for them to reply. The process only gets longer if the credit card details that the guest supplies have a typo or are missing key pieces – another email reply and more waiting!
TransForm helps to reduce much of this crude back-and-forth because you can completely omit the transactional latter half of these types of conversations. Once you’ve provided the guest with what they’re asking for and they’ve approved of the quoted price, you simply send them a private link to an ecommerce portal for them to complete the transaction on their own.
To conclude, take a step back and think about the total number of transactions you process by phone, email and fax each year. How much time does each take to complete? While one transaction may not seem like a lot of time, this quickly adds up when you consider it on a cumulative, annual basis. Especially now, when cheap and willing labor is hard to come by, every second counts and our hope is that by using TransForm you can realize huge time savings over the course of the next year.
