RESOURCE CENTRE

Urban Rest boosts revenue by 1400% with one integrated platform

Learn how the premium flexible accommodation provider has accelerated its global growth.

Time to read: 8 minutes

About the Company

Urban Rest combines the aesthetics of luxury hotels with facilities like fully equipped kitchens to provide longer-term travelers a superior stay and enhance their well-being. The fast-growing business also uses technology to provide outstanding service 24/7.

Summary

Urban Rest efficiently boosts revenue and exceeds growth targets after replacing its complicated technology stack with one integrated customer platform. The business is also set to scale its outstanding service using AI.

The Challenge

Complicated technology stack makes it difficult to sustain rapid growth

Urban Rest launched in Sydney in 2017 and quickly expanded to major cities across the country before opening in Dublin, London and Auckland. The company has doubled its number of properties nearly every six months, outpacing its target of 2x growth per year. However, sustaining this pace has not been easy.

As Urban Rest grew, it quickly added different systems to meet different needs. This resulted in a complicated patchwork of loosely connected systems which limited automation and slowed down processes like onboarding new properties. Teams also had to work doubly hard and move between systems for the data they needed to provide a premium guest experience.

How Salesforce Helps

Einstein 1 provides Urban Rest with one platform to supercharge growth

Urban Rest’s growth is no longer constrained by technology. With Einstein 1, the business has brought sales, service, marketing, and operations onto one integrated platform where they can work more efficiently with trusted AI and data. Team can also use Slack to collaborate around a single source of truth to manage supply and deliver an elevated guest experience.

It all starts with the efficient acquisition and onboarding of new properties. Urban Rest tracks every potential property acquisition as an opportunity in Sales Cloud. This provides complete visibility of the development pipeline and makes it easier to forecast the CapEx required to furnish new properties. Custom workflows in Sales Cloud streamline the administration of acquisition and leasing before triggering onboarding.

The onboarding process is labour- and data-intensive. It involves procuring, installing, and recording every item placed in the property. This data—including appliance instruction manuals—is captured in Knowledge, where the guest relations team can access it to provide expert support.

“By bringing all our data together in Salesforce, our guest relations team comes across as knowing every property like the back of their hand even though they’ve never been there. This is foundational for us in running a digital-first and premium accommodation business,” said Jeff Baars, Chief Commercial Officer, Urban Rest.

And while the experienced team can quickly navigate to the information they need, Customer Service AI helps them work faster by surfacing the right property information based on the guests they are serving. It will also automatically generate case summaries, freeing the team up for high-value tasks.

On top of this, plans to use Slack in tandem with Service Cloud for case swarming so that the team can gather experts and advice to solve complex problems more quickly.

Connected processes and data make every customer touchpoint seamless

As a global accommodation business, Urban Rest has reservations and guest relations specialists available to support guests 24/7. These teams use Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, respectively, to keep things running smoothly around the clock.

Enquiries come in via phone, email, and webchat and are managed as opportunities and cases. So individuals working across locations and time zones can surface the information they need to pick up where their colleagues left off and provide guests a seamless and consistent experience.

With the planned rollout of Field Service, Urban Rest will also provide a more connected and efficient experience to guests on-site. For example, using Visual Remote Assistant for troubleshooting and allocating certain tasks to housekeepers already in the field will help the business reduce the number of callouts by as much as 40%.

"Without Salesforce, we could not have scaled our volume and reach in the way that we have in such a short amount of time.”

Jeff Baars

Chief Commercial Officer, Urban Rest

Revenue Cloud to optimise pricing and help balance supply and demand

Urban Rest has automated invoicing which is enabled by integration between Salesforce, Xero, and Urban Rest’s booking platform, Guesty. Next, it will deploy CPQ to streamline quoting and optimise pricing based on yield management and duration of guest stays.

The business also plans to leverage Revenue Intelligence together with Tableau for better insights into rates, margins, and commissions. Overlaid with data like occupancy rates, these insights will help Urban Rest to better optimise pricing and balance supply and demand.

Amanda Carne, Chief Operating Officer at Urban Rest, shared that Salesforce is already providing the business with previously untapped data to inform strategic decisions.

“We can better measure the health of our sales funnel against targets, and pinpoint where we may be losing out on opportunities because we don’t have space in a certain category or location. All of this data comes together to inform our acquisition strategy and to drive our profitability and growth,” said Carne.

The Salesforce Difference

With Salesforce, Urban Rest’s business is more integrated than ever and teams can apply a 360-degree view of guests and properties to every customer experience. Salesforce also provides the business with trusted AI and data to boost productivity and grow its bottom line.