Empowering Customers and Nurturing Relationships with a Community-powered Content Hub – The Story of Octorate

Octorate offers a comprehensive management suite to hotels, vacation rentals, Airbnbs, and smaller tourism establishments. It is serving as a powerful alternative to the systems that traditionally larger hotel chains use for property management and democratizing access to the latest travel tech tools for hospitality.

Octorate is working with 130 international platforms and enabling smaller hotels as well as Airbnb operators to efficiently book reservations, collect payments, and comply with government regulations. Currently, Octorate is the preferred partner of some of the popular travel brands such as Airbnb, Trivago, Booking.com, Google Hotel Ads, and TripAdvisor.

COVID-19 has been devastating for the travel and tourism industry. When your customers are operating in this space how do you stay connected with your clients and offer support efficiently?

The answer lies in a close-knit community! The community enables you to build and strengthen relationships with customers, keep them involved, and offer valuable knowledge to ensure that customers are getting the best value from your solution.

That’s how the Octorate community got started. Octorate wanted to help their customers by building a community designed to foster collaboration. And the community would be a centralized knowledge hub.

Coming to implementation, the community was launched using Tribe’s built-in functionalities. Given below are the key highlights:

• Since the community is private, only the customers are allowed to log in. Hence, Octorate leveraged the SSO option offered by Tribe to enable only the customers of the platform to log in using their existing credentials.
• Topics are used to categorize content based on different product areas and resource types. For example, topics to cover guides for new customers, share product updates, and highlight resources for specific solutions (booking, payments, distribution, revenue management, etc.)
• Groups are used to connect customers based on the languages and locations. Consider these as the sub-communities to bring members with similar interests for contextual and rich discussions.
• Apart from the Q&A and discussions, the Octorate community also uses the “article” post type to publish private blogs. These are primarily focused on product updates.
• Considering Octorate is a comprehensive solution, educating and training customers with webinars and video tutorials is important. Hence these immersive content assets are uploaded to the community and shared with customers, as training is needed to make the best use of the technology.
• Since Octorate is serving clients in the English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking markets, the community also supports multiple languages. This is implemented via both the Multilingual app and Translation app.
• Other key apps used by Octorate include Intercom integration, Zapier, Virtual Currency, and Reputation.

The content library created by the Octorate team and the number of members grow with time. Hence, the value generated by the community increases accordingly. This enables customers to find the right solutions from the content hub and the internal support team is better equipped to improve the customer experience.

As we can see above, the community serves as a key element in nurturing the relationship, educating customers, offering help, promoting self-service, and setting the customers up for success.

This results in customer retention and loyalty. When a company offers delightful social experiences the customers tend to share the same with others and become brand advocates.

At present, the Octorate customer community is highly active with close to 2,500 members. And this number is only going to grow.

Today Octorate is a key software company in the property management space. More than 20,000 establishments are using Octorate technology to manage online reservations generating a turnover of more than 1,600 million Euros.

‍