In the highly competitive accommodation market, ensuring room occupancy rates are as strong as possible is a constant challenge for hotels. Many are turning to online booking portals but find the task of managing multiple listings quickly becomes complex and time-consuming.
SiteMinder is a technology company that helps hotels overcome this challenge. The firm has developed a guest acquisition platform that automates the listing of rooms across multiple websites to ensure maximum exposure. SiteMinder works with more than 35,000 hotels in 160 countries and generates 100 million reservations worth $US35 billion in revenue each year.
The Challenge: Expand Cloud-First Strategy
As its operations expanded around the world, the company needed to constantly invest in communications infrastructure. Telecommunications and contact centre facilities were deployed in key locations to support staff and allow efficient interactions with clients.
“We had reached the stage where we had four PABX platforms installed around the world,” says SiteMinder’s Director of IT, Michael Badham. “While they functioned relatively well, they were not interconnected. This made it difficult to route calls between offices and meant ongoing management was tedious and complex. There was no easy way to configure the systems or make any changes that were required.”
With staff and client numbers continuing to grow, SiteMinder’s IT team realised that something had to change. The company has a cloud-first strategy and was keen to find a cloud-based platform that could support both its telecommunications and contact centre activity.
The Solution: One Cloud Platform To Scale For Growth
After examining a number of options on the market, a decision was made to replace the company’s ageing PABXs with a cloud solution from 8x8.
Within four months, SiteMinder had deployed 8x8’s single cloud platform, ensuring business continuity and reliability for its Unified Communications and Contact Centres, across Australia, United Kingdom and US offices. Technology partner Arrow Voice and Data assisted in the process by sourcing onsite hardware and arranging relevant licencing.
“The 8x8 offering stood out as they had clearly been designed from the ground up with the cloud in mind,” says Badham. “We could see that it would allow us to scale both our telephony and contact centre capabilities to better match our anticipated future growth.”
Once the platform was fully configured and staff had been trained, the new infrastructure went live around the world initially in Australia followed by the US, Europe and Thailand. SiteMinder currently has 100 contact centre seats and 300 unified communications users on the platform.
