How Cloudbeds shortened WhatsApp onboarding to under a minute with Twilio’s Tech Provider Program
Time to read: 4 minutes
Challenge
Cloudbeds – a hospitality management software leader and longtime Twilio partner – wanted to make it faster and easier for hotels and guests to communicate throughout the guest journey, but WhatsApp onboarding was slow and cumbersome.
Solution
Cloudbeds now can quickly onboard partner properties onto WhatsApp – freeing up much needed time to explore more ways to enhance the guest communication experience.
About a decade ago, the hotel and lodging industry was in a bit of a pickle. Guests would book their stay, come and go without interacting with staff, and then leave a negative review. Why? Who knows.
That was the problem.
This trend of “ghost guests” sparked an idea for Chris Hovanessian, Lead of Guest Experience at Cloudbeds. Why can’t communication be easier between hotels and their guests?
Hotels, Airbnbs, and other places that accommodate overnight guests have a particular need for innovative communication tools. Hoteliers and hosts want to be able to communicate asynchronously with guests on the channels they prefer to ensure a great experience. Guests want the ability to get in touch when they need to—and the less friction, the better.
Property owners and hoteliers are eager to address customer service requests, but struggle to do so on the channels guests prefer, whether it’s SMS, Voice, WhatsApp, or others. Chris and his partners set out to develop a solution to help hotels create these connections and maintain ownership of the guest relationship throughout the entire journey.
“How do we automate processes allowing for the hotel staff to then have more time with the guests in front of them? Because most of the time they're spent doing mundane repetitive tasks that can be automated. A lot of it through messaging.”
Transforming how hotels communicate
In 2015, Chris co-founded the Whistle guest management platform to help lodging businesses streamline the way they communicate. The platform launched with Twilio at the core of their communication abilities, starting with SMS, MMS, and call forwarding. Cloudbeds – a popular cloud-based hospitality management platform – was already using Twilio for two-factor authentication and some transactional emails, but wanted a more unified guest communication experience. Cloudbeds recognized the power and simplicity of Whistle’s engagement solution and acquired the company in 2022.
Its core functionality of scheduled messages is now known as Whistle for Cloudbeds, and enables partner properties to curate the guest journey to their specific needs. From pre-arrival to post-stay, guests receive messages on their preferred channel for confirmations, information, signatures, check-ins, upsells, reviews, and more.
“Asynchronous communication on platforms like SMS or WhatsApp are now the preferred communication channel for most low to medium urgency type of situations,” says Chris.
Across messaging platforms, Whistle for Cloudbeds facilitates real-time communication between hotels and guests to support better experiences—and fewer mysterious negative reviews after the fact.
As Cloudbeds’ global presence grew, they noticed that WhatsApp was wildly popular in most markets outside of the US and Canada. But there was a little problem: The onboarding process for WhatsApp was cumbersome, involved many steps, and could take over a month to implement each of Cloudbeds’s customers.
Twilio provided this feedback from Cloudbeds and several other Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) facing similar issues with WhatsApp onboarding to Meta. As a result, Meta released the WhatsApp Tech Provider Program to help scale the WhatsApp onboarding process.
Twilio’s Tech Provider Program clears the way for global growth
As business boomed internationally, new customers – especially in LATAM and Europe – made it clear that WhatsApp was their preferred messaging service.
“Pressure for an improved WhatsApp process and other capabilities started to build,” recalls Chris.
Thanks to the WhatsApp Tech Provider Program, WhatsApp onboarding is now almost effortless for Cloudbeds’ customers. The technical process of WhatsApp onboarding – verifying the phone number ownership with Meta, updating the branded profile, and configuring it to work with the Cloudbeds platform – can now all be done in a single API call using Twilio’s Senders API and is near instantaneous. Before, the entire process could take about four weeks.
“Overall, it's very simple. It's like a button click. It's moving away from this rigorous process to just guiding the customer to click through and enable it,” Chris explains.
“We actually launched because of Twilio back in the day. We came across Twilio and then that's when it clicked and seemed like something like this is possible. We’ve looked at other competitors but Twilio continues to be the best, based on our experience.”
Increased guest satisfaction, operational efficiency, and property revenue
Properties that implement the Cloudbeds solution can see anywhere from a 10 to 15 percent increase in guest satisfaction within just the first few months. That increase in satisfaction isn’t just for bragging rights. Happy guests keep coming back for life.
Chris explains: “That type of increase in loyalty and overall customer satisfaction has a direct impact on the hotels overall revenue through ways like average daily rates (ADR). This allows the property to increase their rates because they are receiving more direct bookings.”
Cloudbeds is also able to help partner properties expand their use of messaging to finding new guests: “A lot of properties are leaning into Instagram marketing,” Chris explains, “and using it as a channel to facilitate real-time lead gen. They can now communicate with their prospective guests directly through Instagram.”
What’s next on the list for Cloudbeds and Twilio? A lot:
A Twilio Voice and WhatsApp Voice implementation is in the works, allowing properties to bring all of their communications methods onto a single platform.
A pilot program aims to smooth out updates made in response to messaging regulations, such that Twilio automatically updates the API flow every time a new regulation comes out.
The team developed a self-service option for customer properties, using the Content API to make updating WhatsApp message templates simple, instead of having to pre-submit them for approval.
Plus, Cloudbeds is rebuilding the Whistle product into the Cloudbeds app, a big step toward a more integrated and seamless experience for users.
Exceptional service at scale – it all comes down to communication
Cloudbeds revolutionized hotel and guest communications with a solution that is at once simple, flexible, and scalable. While it’s hard to imagine staying somewhere and having to still use a hard-wired phone to call the front desk, the truth is that many places are still stuck in their old ways—giving Cloudbeds a lot of room to grow.
With the help of Twilio, Cloudbeds continues to innovate and deliver a more seamless way for its partner properties to thrive. As more and more property owners and hoteliers learn how helpful the Cloudbeds solution is, the company will help them delight even more guests.
