Spotnana uses DevRev to enhance both customer engagement and team collaboration
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Last Updated
Company
Spotnana
Founded
January 2020
Industry
Travel-as-a-Service
Employees
251-500
Headquarters
New York
The company
Spotnana, a leader in the travel industry, is on a mission to change the corporate travel industry by modernizing its infrastructure. Spotnana's Travel-as-a-Service Platform brings a fresh perspective to corporate travel, making it simpler, more affordable, and efficient.
Founded by industry leaders, Shikhar and Sarosh, Spotnana has rapidly evolved from a small team of five to a thriving workforce of 250+, even amidst the challenges posed by the pandemic. This growth underscores their dedication to bringing an improved experience to corporate travelers worldwide.
Spotnana operates at the intersection of technology and travel, empowering a network of agency, supplier, and technology partners to innovate and elevate the travel experience. With a strong emphasis on culture, communication, and decision-making, Spotnana has positioned itself as a beacon of innovation in the corporate travel industry. Their commitment to excellence and transformative solutions sets them apart in the world of travel.
The challenge
Spotnana faced several challenges in scaling their operations and maintaining a strong company culture as they expanded from a team of five to 200 employees during the pandemic. They recognized the importance of effective communication, culture-building, and customer-centricity to sustain their growth.
When a feature request comes in, especially from an enterprise customer, we assess if it's specific to a single customer or has a broader appeal. The benefit is that fulfilling these requests paves the way for other large customers. For example, one of our customers has a vast user base. They're not just addressing one department, but are considering 14,000 users.
Communication and culture: Transitioning from five to 200 team members virtually raised questions about communication, decision-making, and culture definition and maintenance.
Tool fragmentation: Utilizing numerous tools for different functionalities (e.g., Salesforce, Freshdesk, Jira, Figma, Notion, Smartsheets, and more) led to disjointed operations.
Customer service and support: Without a structured ticketing system, customer success managers were manually handling queries, preventing scalability and efficient customer service.
Data fragmentation:
GenAI, and its knowledge graph, is collapsing boundaries between tools and our departments. In this day and age of hyper-efficiency, we were staring at nine different tools, the data and AI pipeline costs on top of them, and we knew we had to make a change.
As they learned more about DevRev, they got excited about making a commitment to the entire platform. Improving their customer success processes was an important factor, but Spotnana wanted to use DevRev across their entire company.
The solution
Shikhar, one of Spotnana's co-founders, had been following DevRev and knew about its potential to address their customer support challenges. When the customer success team at Spotnana needed a modern ticketing system, Shikhar knew where to look. Immediately, he and Cynthia Beldner, Head of Customer Support and Success at Spotnana, were sold on its design and comprehensive, unified solution.
I'd need to go out and buy several different tools in order to do what DevRev is doing, and then combine them together and deal with the integrations, and the integrations are never as good as we hope they’ll be.
DevRev offered an integrated solution that would streamline their operations and help them achieve their goals. The key features of DevRev that caught their attention included:
Unified customer and product experience: DevRev enabled Spotnana to converge product and customer experiences into one platform, merging the fragmented toolset into a streamlined solution.
AI-driven customer support: Utilizing AI-first solutions for common customer queries, Spotnana significantly reduced manual efforts in resolving repetitive questions, improving customer service and freeing up time for customer success staff.
Design excellence: Spotnana, valuing design highly in internal and external communications, was captivated by DevRev's intuitive and aesthetically pleasing user interface, especially the 'Trails' feature that enabled them to effortlessly manage their product hierarchy and roadmap.
DevRev has centralized our workflow, enabling our engineers and PMs to remain on the pulse of real-time updates. Our team loves it because it enables them to support our customers better.
The results
Enhanced customer support: With AI leading the front, customer inquiries are resolved more efficiently, providing quick, consistent, and accurate responses. Plus, customers are given a clear view of ticket resolution progress and upcoming features designed to address their specific concerns.
Unified data view: Collating data from product and customer experiences in one place, Spotnana can drive more data-driven decisions.
Streamlined internal communication and product management: DevRev’s features eliminated the need for multiple platforms, bringing Spotnana’s operations into a unified, cohesive workflow. By uniting multiple functionalities within DevRev, it reduced their dependency on various point solutions.
Improved cultural communication: Having a single platform facilitated centralized communication and document sharing, which in turn improved culture around communication and team alignment. Leveraging AI to eliminate basic administrative work, also freed up team bandwidth to focus on more challenging initiatives.
Moving forward
Spotnana expressed excitement about DevRev's product roadmap and plans to make full use of the platform's capabilities. They intend to train their team members to become power users and fully leverage the extensible nature of the product. They believe in DevRev's vision and trust the team to deliver on it.
In conclusion, Spotnana found in DevRev a solution that not only addresses their operational challenges but also supports their cultural and growth aspirations. The partnership promised to bring even more benefits as they continue to scale their business.
