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Customer Story
Language Specialist, Booking.com
Internal communication between teams can be a nightmare. Especially if those teams are distributed globally, and work across different time zones.
Keeping everything up to date and information centralized can be a hard hill to climb.
That’s the case with Booking.com. The online reservation giant boasts over 790,000 hotels and has more than 9,000 employees working in 150 offices around the world. Their site is localized in 41 different languages.
We met Thomas Trip at Booking’s Amsterdam office. Over a coffee, we discussed how Piktochart helps Booking.com with their internal communication.
Thomas, previously a music artist with the band The Crowns, is now a Language Specialist at Booking.com.
Thomas works in the content department in Booking’s Headquarters in Central Amsterdam.
The team owns text, pictures, videos and all of the content that’s being published on the website. His role, as a language specialist, is to ensure the website is localized in their respective language. In addition to that, Thomas manages the freelancers who translate the hotel descriptions. There are over 790,000 accommodations featured on the Booking.com website, so they need to outsource that work, and make sure “the quality is up to Booking.com standards”.
Another of his daily tasks is managing user feedback. “I deal with all of the comments that come from our Dutch speaking customers”, he explains. This allows him to get his ‘boots on the ground’, and be closer to the end user.
Every Booking team has a different way of measuring success. However, they all utilize KPIs (Key Progress Indicators).
“We have several KPI’s related to our translation tasks”, describes Thomas. “Yes, they provide each other with feedback and following the guidelines, but in the end, it’s the customer who determines the quality of the final translation.” Thomas explains how they measure something so subjective: “The way we measure its success is by sending satisfaction surveys to our clients that helps us understand how our quality is perceived”.
Their second KPI is the speed of translations. “We have around 45 translation requests coming in every day, so it’s quite a lot and it’s important to keep deadlines. We also evaluate our freelancers and send them tips and tricks to follow the guidelines. We need to make sure our translations are realistic, meaning the descriptions that people read about a hotel or property on our website matches with what they see when they arrive”.
All exciting and worthwhile endeavors have challenges. For Thomas, it’s making sure everyone is up to speed with what is happening in the company. Effective communication is what allows the team to achieve their KPI and to deliver fantastic language and booking experience to their customers.
“The company is based in Amsterdam but there are 24 local offices, 150 offices in total worldwide. The challenge is to make sure everyone is updated”.
Booking is a huge company with over 9,000 employees distributed around the globe. Therefore, “a lot of communication is happening around in the form of emails, presentations. It’s challenging sometimes to reach the internal audience with the message that you want to convey”.
When thousands of employees communicate globally over email and long reports, it becomes difficult to keep track of things.
That’s when a tool like Piktochart comes into play.
Thomas and the Booking content team use Piktochart in many different ways.
They have fun creating promotional posters for local events: “We have a social responsibility program called ‘Booking Cares’ and I’ve seen several people’s posters hanging around the office inviting others to join their project. It’s encouraging and inspiring to see people being so creative and using Piktochart to raise awareness for social causes!”
But the major use for Piktochart is to make internal communications run smoothly.
The Booking teams create beautiful infographics to share internally with colleagues, and other language specialists. This is extremely important according to Thomas.
Another super useful case for Piktochart reporting is geared towards Booking’s internal customers. Thomas explains in more detail: “We do a lot of user feedback analysis and I use Piktochart to present the results in a quick and visually attractive way so that researchers can grasp the idea and come up with suitable solutions”.
Finding Piktochart marks a significant change for Booking’s content team. Before, long email summaries with attached Word reports were commonplace. This was extremely tedious and time consuming, and with so many teams and projects around the world, it was challenging to keep track of everything.
Thomas expresses that “Piktochart helped us save time which was previously spent on going through other people’s results. Now we have a project database where everything is logged and represented visually, so that people can click and see infographics that provide an easy to understand overview. Everything has become more visually attractive and people are able to quickly communicate the key results of their teams so that everyone is up to speed and can focus on their daily jobs”.
In other words, Piktochart makes sure the Booking.com team can easily communicate results and keep each other up to date about team happenings around the world.
Thomas has some design experience with Photoshop and InDesign. As a curious individual, he has always liked exploring these programs due to his interest in web design. But that’s not the case with everyone in Booking.com’s content team.
Thomas is a huge fan of the variety of icons that you can find in Piktochart.
“Many times I’m searching for something so unique that I don’t even expect to find it and then, there it is! This helps me visualize many ideas and concepts without using too many words”. If you remember from the last section, the team tries to reduce long and tedious emails, and being able to transform text into a visually compelling story is a huge win.
For Thomas, using icons with text and company brand colors is enough for an appealing visual to print out or share with others. And he is absolutely right. Sometimes, less is more. “I keep the hex codes of our brand colors next to my desk as a cheat sheet and make sure to use them in my designs. I find photo frames powerful to quickly visualize ideas.”
All in all, Thomas mentioned that it wasn’t hard to convince management to use Piktochart because it’s very cost-efficient compared to the Adobe products.
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Booking.com
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