Oasis switched from Desk.com to Front to manage 24-hour communication with clients while growing the global team 100% year over year.
In 2009, Oasis began renting luxury destination homes to travelers seeking both culture and comfort — delivering hotel-style convenience with concierge support, precise check-in, and hand-picked local experiences. Expanding rapidly to 25 cities in Latin America, North America, and Europe, Oasis plans to grow its model of “Home Meets Hotel” across 50 cities and 7,500 properties globally by 2019.
Challenge
“Customers from all over the world email us to request luxury home rentals. We needed a clear way to stay on top of their requests and manage the back-and-forth professionally and efficiently,” explained Amanda Kwok, Senior Director of Guest Experiences. Oasis originally turned to Desk.com by Salesforce to help them manage their communications. Using Desk, they faced three big challenges:
No easy access to information
“There were a lot of issues with the API. We couldn’t see any data from our own property management system within Desk,” Marina Dominguez Balanzat, Oasis’ Director of Reservations, explained. Desk didn’t work with their other tools either, forcing their team to jump between multiple platforms to locate the information they needed.
Not customizable to their workflow
With Desk, Oasis had to put all of their pending customer communications into two folders to stay on top of them, which was far from their ideal workflow.
Desk was complicated and cumbersome. It always felt like we were finding workarounds, rather than getting the ease up front.
– Marina Dominguez Balanzat, Director of Reservations, Oasis
Difficult to match their brand look and feel
“Desk didn’t accurately represent our brand. We couldn’t easily bold text, or insert the images we wanted,” Marina said. With no simple way to format their emails, the team had to spend extra time to customize each message.
Solution
Rapidly growing 100% year over year, Oasis wanted a partner who would scale with them. In June 2017, Oasis replaced Desk with Front’s platform. Today, over 110 Oasis employees in their guest experience, reservation, destination, and management teams use Front every day to respond to guests faster and collaborate with each other across 20+ offices.
Easy access to customer information
The Oasis team can access all their customer information quickly in Front. Using Front’s API, they connected their property management system and other tools. Managers also have more visibility. “I get clear insight into everything — from how many emails someone has assigned to them, to when they respond,” Amanda notes. This level of transparency lets managers monitor individual performance and plan workloads for their team members.
Automation to work more productively
Oasis enhanced their workflow with 70+ automated rules in Front. “We can automatically move the right messages to the right folders, keeping our workflow organized and clean,” Amanda says. Marina also credits Front for increasing their productivity.
Front’s canned responses feature lets us format messages into our brand and has saved us a lot of time responding to customers compared to Desk’s solution, which was very manual.
– Marina Dominguez Balanzat, Director of Reservations, Oasis
Visibility to provide 24-hour support
As a global company, it’s important for Oasis to provide 24-hour coverage. Front enables the collaboration critical for customer support. Marina explains, “Rather than forwarding emails, we can look at each other’s cases, and just comment, tag specific people, and share information with the right people, instead of crowding everyone’s inbox.”
As Oasis continues to grow their business, they’re excited to continue working with the team. Marina says, “Front is always developing new things. We want our partners to constantly change and evolve with us. And that’s exactly what Front offers.”
Slack
Trello
