Urban Rest uses Agentforce to deliver scalable, personalised service, 24/7.

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

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. 

It also became difficult and costly to scale service at the pace needed to provide guests with personalised support 24/7.

Agentforce unlocks efficiency and scale in guest service 

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. 

Urban Rest has now deployed Agentforce to continue scaling service at the pace needed while also elevating the guest experience. Its first agent autonomously engages with guests 24/7 to respond to questions such as where to locate the WiFi code. 

Responses are conversational and tailored to Urban Rest’s brand voice. They are also grounded in the company’s data, including structured and unstructured knowledge articles, which will be brought together in Data Cloud. 

General troubleshooting questions represent up to a third of total support volumes and Urban Rest anticipates Agentforce will resolve most automatically, delivering an estimated 25-30% return on investment within 12 months of deployment. 

Amanda Carne, Chief Operating Officer at Urban Rest, shared that Agentforce was the ideal solution to its needs, with guardrails to ensure agents deliver the exact service experience the company wants to deliver and in its own brand voice. 

Also, building its own AI solution was never a consideration for the company. “I am a big believer in focusing on what you’re good at, and for us, that is creating really beautiful accommodation for our guests. So when it comes to technology, we use the very best rather than invest in building it ourselves,” said Carne.

The guest relations team will have their own agent in the future, which will provide actionable insights and AI-powered recommendations to help them handle remaining inquiries faster and more effectively. This will reduce the risk of burnout and attrition by alleviating the pressure on team members. It will also remove the need to know every little detail about each property and help new employees be fully effective in their roles much faster. 

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%. 

Salesforce provides Urban Rest with one platform to supercharge growth 

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

Urban Rest now 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 involves procuring, installing, and recording every item placed in the property. This data—including appliance instruction manuals—is captured in Knowledge and used by the guest relations team and agents 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.

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. 

Carne 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.

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.