OYO Hotels & Homes, India’s hotel chain startup, launched multi-lingual support for their in-house built app Krypton to help property managers audit the hotels and take customer feedback.
The COVID-19 pandemic has required companies to adjust more quickly than ever before and accelerate their digitization plans to continue functioning in a mostly remote environment. In order to improve efficiency of hotel operations on-ground during the pandemic, OYO has announced multi-lingual support for Krypton.
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The in-house built mobile audit application will be now available in 12 languages.
The Krypton app in simple terms carries out audits, building communication, interactions and performance monitoring of property managers. This will enable OYO’s property managers who are working remotely on-ground especially from Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities in India to operate the app in their native language.
The Tech Panda spoke to Anil Goel, Group Chief Technology and Product Officer, OYO, to find out the hotel chain’s vision for the Krypton app.
Anil Goel
Since OYO is present across hundreds of cities in India, with most property managers being fluent and comfortable to speak in their local dialects, the availability of Krypton in vernacular languages will bolster higher adoption of learning videos and increase participation of property managers in maintaining regular communication with the central team
Goel reveals that the multi-lingual support of Krypton has provided OYO the opportunity to retain greater agility as well as maintain closer ties with its employees, customers, and asset partners.
“As property managers are from diverse backgrounds, the multilingual feature of the app will enhance their learning experience. By identifying the underlying patterns in customer behaviour, we can anticipate and cater to emerging guest needs, thus improving engagement and driving repeat rates for guests resulting in a higher yield for asset owners,” he says.
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OYO’s on-ground teams are responsible for providing training to the property managers who run hotels by taking care of auditing the properties for infrastructure, hygiene and cleanliness, and interacting with customers to ensure high quality stay-in experiences.
Given the current challenging situation, the movement of their on-ground team has been restricted. In order to maintain constant communication and monitor their performance, OYO has launched multi-lingual support to the app to help property managers audit the hotels and take customer feedback.
The Power of Language
The Krypton app is now available in 12 Indian languages, including English, Hindi, Assamese, Bengali, Odia, Punjabi, Gujrati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, and Kannada. They also have plans to launch many more vernacular languages.
Goel reveals that given the restrictions and social distancing norms brought about by the pandemic, OYO realized that many of their processes required re-tooling, so that they could ensure the health and safety of on-ground employees and partners.
Activities such as auditing of a property for infrastructure, hygiene and cleanliness, training of property managers and interaction with customers for feedback earlier carried out through physical verification were no longer possible.
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With Krypton, the hotel chain is enabling their asset partners and on-ground employees to leverage tech to capture customer feedback, their preferences and behaviour, which helps identify any experience issues.
“To enhance customer delight and in return increase demand for our asset partners, OYO is continuously investing in training property managers,” says Goel.
Their extensive digital learning platform has videos on handling guest check-in, check-out, tariff reconciliations and customer feedback collections. All of this is embedded in the Krypton app for property managers.
To Support Property Managers
The core component of Krypton is the audit module, which is capable of providing information on the property through text input, live images, and videos. The audits can be configured to geo-location and supports to ensure that the property manager is available at the property or hotel and the data is accurate.
To enhance customer delight and in return increase demand for our asset partners, OYO is continuously investing in training property managers
“Since OYO is present across hundreds of cities in India, with most property managers being fluent and comfortable to speak in their local dialects, the availability of Krypton in vernacular languages will bolster higher adoption of learning videos and increase participation of property managers in maintaining regular communication with the central team,” Goel explains.
The app is available on Android phones. It has been launched in mweb version to increase its adoptions in case the property manager does not have a smartphone.
Apart from Krypton, OYO has rolled out tech-enabled improvements across several areas, including product, addressing partner and customer needs, OTA operations, refund systems, research on partner and customer decisions, dashboards, follow-ups, among others.
