Sertifi’s 2024 New Years Resolutions

Brian: Aside from maintaining our approach to remain consistent and keep business as usual, my own personal resolution is "honoring my time.” I want this to be a year of focus and a year where I do things I truly enjoy.

Paige: Our team aims to ensure that our customers have a seamless transition to our next-generation platform. Our new platform not only offers a modern and visually appealing interface but also provides a more personalized experience for users based on their specific roles within the hotel. This means that individuals in different departments, such as front desk staff, sales, or management, will have access to features and functionalities that are specifically tailored to their needs. We also introduced some exciting new features that can enhance the user’s overall efficiency.

Shawn: We have plenty of personal resolutions, but we do want to collaborate more across Sertifi this year and find as many opportunities as possible to learn from our amazing customer community. From a goals perspective, we want to find new outlets for bringing hotels and entertainment venues into the Sertifi community, build our brand more in key areas that we don’t exist in today, get better at sharing important product information with our customers, and make sure our customers have all the resources they need to be successful with our product. 

Brian: We have some exciting things planned, and I'm looking forward to seeing those rolled out. On my end, I'm excited to further bolster our teams and improve the overall Sertifi experience for our internal colleagues in addition to our customers. 

Paige: I’d love to get more properties using SertifiPay and ACH to make the process easier not only for the hotel but also for their guests. 

Shawn: Honestly, I’m most excited to listen. We really dove into better ways to hear from our customers last year, such as launching an Ideas Portal for the product. I think we can continue to innovate just by listening and maybe discovering new ways to help customers that we don’t even have on the docket today. I’ll also add that we want to do more to help our customers stay trained and current with the product, so we’re investing in more online training materials and self-serve ways that customers can use to make sure they’re getting the most out of Sertifi. 

Brian: I recently stayed at a hotel with a digital key and an app to enhance the experience, which was my first time encountering either one. I'm definitely interested to see how the industry continues to handle the flux of "revenge tourism” and how brands handle the overall guest experience while not entirely migrating to a full "self-checkout model" like some retail brands rushed into.

Paige: Meeting and events are coming back strong this year!

Shawn: While I definitely think staffing issues will continue to be a concern this year, I do think the evolving payments landscape in hospitality is a really interesting one. More hotels are looking for easier ways to take payments, including more alternative payment methods like ACH. I love seeing hospitality evolve in the same way we’re already seeing e-commerce and other industries evolve to just take payments in the way customers want to pay.

Brian: The tried-and-true Sertifi e-signature. I use it every month for employee paperwork, and it never disappoints. I wonder if I could use it with my eyes closed at this point... 

Paige: The “Needs Attention” list on next-gen’s “View Authorizations” workflow. It’s so helpful to see exactly which folders require action rather than going through the entire list. You can quickly update authorizations sent by a travel management company or update information to ensure a successful push to your PMS. 

Shawn: I think travel authorizations are really cool. We only have a subset of customers using them today, but the fact that a travel company can quickly and securely get their traveler’s details right into Sertifi at one of our customer hotels is a great way to enhance the guest experience. I worked at a travel agency almost 20 years ago now, but we would fax, wait for confirmation, not get the confirmation, send info again – it was a pain – all trying to make sure our clients never had to worry about anything on their trip. 

Brian: Your favorite Sertifi rep, contact, or colleague may not be a part of Sertifi yet. We are growing and will continue to add top talent to ensure that you have a quality experience. Be on the lookout for new faces. 

Paige: Don’t be surprised if we want to talk with you more about your day-to-day or how you use different systems. Everything we do is with the customer in mind, and we want to learn more about what you need so we can deliver a better customer experience. 

Shawn: I don’t want to spoil any of the big product announcements, but I will say that we have some cool work happening on the integrations front and the payments front and are continuing to evolve the next-generation platform we launched last year. On the marketing side, we do spend a lot of time thinking about how people consume information and making that ever better, so I’m personally excited for us to provide more educational resources to the community, share more customer success stories, and do more of the in-person Sertifi Sessions events that we started last year in Dallas. Connecting with the community in person is great, and we do plan to have even more feet on the ground this year. 

Brian: Close your eyes and picture a sandwich. What did you see? Did you see something that looked like this –🥪– two pieces of bread with various ingredients in the middle? Of course you did, because that's what a sandwich is! Not only does a hot dog fall into its own category a la the cheeseburger, Italian beef, or general fast-food fare, but I would also argue that a hot dog is closer to a taco than a sandwich. We need to be asking if a hot dog is a taco before we even try to bestow the hot dog with the honor of being called a sandwich. The sandwich is sacred. 

Paige: Hmm…that’s a tough one! That’s like asking if a unicorn is a horse; it is, but it isn’t. I think we just let the hot dog be a unicorn. 

Shawn: Merriam-Webster defines a “sandwich” as “two or more slices of bread or a split roll having a filling in between.” Thus, to truly be considered a sandwich, two conditions must be met for the hot dog: a split roll (check) and filling in between that split roll (double check). I don’t like it as much as you do: we’ve all spent our lives being fed the idea that hot dogs exist on a different temporal plane as sandwiches. Nonetheless, we have definitions for a reason, and a hot dog is inarguably a sandwich.