• Lifts mission of customer satisfaction by slashing delays in customer service response time by 90%

• Drives transformative operational efficiencies by automating ingestion of up to 500 hotel specifications in SaaS platform

• Protects company secrets in hotel management software development with BeyondCorp zero-trust solutions

Treebo Hotels (Treebo) is an Indian budget hotel chain whose name is inspired by the Bo Tree under which the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. In this image of spiritual shelter, the founders saw the perfect symbol for their mission to guarantee dignity in affordable lodging across the vast Indian subcontinent.

From timeless inspiration, Treebo developed next-generation software to enable the goal of ensuring a consistent level of quality in hundreds of budget hotels across India. The Hotel Superhero platform became the firm's one-stop-shop for hotel management automation, from reservations to check-ins, technical maintenance, and inventory of essentials such as clean towels and sheets. The solution was so successful that Treebo turned Hotel Superhero into a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) product for any hospitality operation in need of automated hotel quality control.

The system relies upon dozens of auditors fanned out across India who carry out in-person hotel inspections. They feed data on problems such as elevator malfunctions, inadequate cleanliness or low amenity stock into the Hotel Superhero platform through Treebo's proprietary app. Treebo also employs maintenance personnel, system engineers and hotel clerks across the country who must act in real-time upon Hotel Superhero communications.

In such a distributed organization, Treebo needed the most versatile productivity and collaboration tools available to enable seamless organizational coordination, for rapid hotel management response times, in its mission to "bring predictability to the budget travel experience."

Working with partner Shivaami, Treebo embarked upon a complex integration of its Hotel Superhero platform with Google Workspace to enable immediate actionable readouts of quality control data pouring in from across India, in convenient Sheets dashboards. Adoption of Google Workspace also enabled frictionless collaboration among hundreds of Treebo staff dispersed across India.

"Our mission is to deliver consistent quality and predictability in hundreds of hotels across India and beyond," says Mayank Khandelwal, Co-founder of Treebo Hotels. "With Google Workspace we transformed the speed with which we ensure outstanding customer experiences with real-time quality control."

According to Khandelwal, one of the most powerful features of Google Workspace is the way products such as Sheets and Forms integrate with Treebo's SaaS platform to enable secure and automated migration of data. When Treebo inspectors enter quality control data into the company app, it is exported directly from the platform's databases into Sheets for instant actioning by the Treebo team. Easy-to-read Sheets dashboards, meanwhile, give management a birds-eye overview of its most important performance metrics.

Automated data integration between Hotel Superhero APIs and Sheets have transformed the speed it takes to onboard a new hotel into the Treebo network, says Khandelwal. In the early days, this was a manual process in which staff needed to exchange emails and enter up to 500 specifications for each hotel, from room size to lighting fixtures and kitchen capacity, into the software application, one by one. Through the integration of Treebo APIs with Sheets, all of these specifications are automatically loaded into the Hotel Superhero platform. Khandelwal says this has yielded an 80% reduction in time required to onboard a new hotel.

"Beyond manual aspects where somebody has to physically inspect the hotels, all of our hotel quality control has become automated with Google Workspace," says Khandelwal. "That is transforming our ability to bring in new hotels, and improve the quality of our services."

Venus Seth, Head of Operations at Treebo Hotels adds, "We have more than 80 field team members conducting various types of quality check audits in our 1000+ properties on a daily basis, and all of the audit data flows into the various Live dashboards that we have created on Sheets, which are available for everyone at any time and help them understand their current coverage compared to the targets and overall performance.”

One of the major challenges that Treebo faced during the pandemic was the need for its software development team to gain secure zero-trust enterprise security for remote logins, so company secrets could be kept safe. This was not necessary in pre-Covid days when the entire development team was co-located in the same office in Bengaluru.

Originally, Treebo used an open-source VPN solution for remote logins. But it soon encountered problems when a worker left the organization and needed to be offboarded. With the legacy solution, Treebo would occasionally forget to disable VPN credentials, creating a security risk.

Guided by Shivaami, Treebo decided to adopt BeyondCorp as its zero-trust enterprise security solution, enabling secure work from virtually any location without the need for a traditional VPN. Crucially, BeyondCorp automated the process of disabling access credentials in the deboarding process, giving Treebo both convenience and peace of mind.

Khandelwal recalls that Shivaami enabled Treebo to optimally configure BeyondCorp to meet its individualized needs with a high degree of expertise, even though this was the Google Cloud Partner's inaugural BeyondCrop project.

"As their first BeyondCorp project, Shivaami really went the extra mile to understand from Google engineers on how to get the most out of it for a zero-trust environment," says Khandelwal.

As Treebo expands its Hotel Superhero SaaS offering in international markets, it faces new security and data protection needs, in particular complying with data protection protocols such as GDPR in the European Union. With Google Workspace, Treebo enjoys built-in data protection features to enable its international compliance. For extra security, Treebo has adopted Google Vault as a data retention and tracking service, giving it 100% control over all sensitive data at all times.

"With BeyondCorp and Google Vault, we're confident that proprietary data, as well as corporate customer and hotel guest data are all fully secure, so we can expand with peace of mind across India and beyond," says Khandelwal.