The Housekeeping Shift
Housekeeping is one of the largest, most expensive departments in any hotel, and with that comes unique challenges. Several existing tools in the market—including Quore—helped hotel staff track parts of the process, but not a single tool tracked the end-to-end workflow in its entirety. We realized there was so much more that we could do to help improve the housekeeping shift.
Many Players, Competing Goals
The Housekeeping department consists of many roles that participate in the cleaning process, also knows as a Breakout, each with competing goals and priorities. The main challenges in streamlining housekeeping operations was to take the guesswork out of it by giving everyone real-time visibility into room cleaning status, reducing delays in handoffs to increases internal efficiency and ultimately, ensuring rooms are ready for guests upon check-in.
Understanding Needs
When I began working on this project the team knew there was more work that needed to be done to fully understand our user’s needs, pain points, the complexities of their current workflow and what was even working well. Our research included shadowing of real housekeeping employees at Quore customer hotels to observe their process during a shift, studying the industry-leading textbooks for housekeeping management, and consulting with external and in-house knowledge-bearers who could help us better understand the mindset of our potential users.
We mapped out all our user flows to get a full picture of the complex system we were servicing. These intricate flows helped us surface opportunities for optimizing the workflow for each persona.
Low fidelity wireframes and clickable prototypes helped us quickly iterate to validate possible solutions. We user tested key flows in the experience with customers who fit each of our personas.
Bringing it all Together
Cleanings Plus included expanded features like customizable breakout boards, mobile cleanings and inspections with push notifications, and a real-time dashboard of room status to increase visibility and streamline the day-to-day process of housekeeping. From creating customized cleaning inspection templates and building breakout boards to setting standard cleaning times, and more, our new app helps housekeeping manage their workday without all the papers.
Building Upon the Experience
Our release included extensive beta testing with Quore customers, which quickly revealed the need for several new features that were table stakes for bringing this product to market. We spent several follow-up sprints filling in these gaps to improve its market-readiness.
Going to Market
We launched the new product to great fanfare, utilizing in-product marketing to boost awareness amongst our customers. Even while still in beta, Cleanings Plus was voted the number-one Housekeeping Management Software by Hotel Tech Report’s 2018 Hotel Tech Awards, a consumer ratings site!
