This episode is part of a special series marking HiJiffy’s 10th anniversary, with team members sharing a behind-the-scenes look at the company. Ana Correia is a Strategic Customer Success Manager, nearly five years in, with a background in hospitality operations. She talks about the culture she values most, where no idea is invalid and anyone can contribute, the client “a-ha!” moments when they see the time the chatbot saves and the direct bookings it drives, and why the twice-yearly team photo, remembering when there were only 20 of them in white polos, is still her proudest moment.
Tiago Araújo (00:01): Hi everyone, we’re here again for one more episode of our special edition, where we’re celebrating 10 years of HiJiffy, and we decided to invite people from HiJiffy to talk a little bit more about the company. With us today we have Ana Correia. Thank you so much, Ana, for joining.
Ana Correia (00:25): Thank you for having me, Tiago.
Tiago Araújo (00:29): Just to kick things off, as I always do, could you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit more about what you do at HiJiffy?
Ana Correia (00:38): Of course. I’m Ana, as you said. I’ve been working at HiJiffy for the past four years; it’ll be five years in March next year. My role within the team is Strategic Customer Success Manager. So my role is really about building strong relationships with our clients, understanding their business needs, and making sure we deliver the right value of the product and make them grow. And obviously, there’s also a strategic part to this role: identifying opportunities for improvement, growing the clients, and making sure the product goes exactly to what their needs are, whatever their needs might be. So that’s more or less a little bit of what I do.
Tiago Araújo (01:27): Amazing, so always adapting a product that has so many functionalities to the needs of the client.
Ana Correia (01:32): Exactly, and making sure we have partnerships that last a long time. As you know more than me, we have clients that have been with us for so long, and that’s part of the role.
Tiago Araújo (01:45): One question I always ask on this special edition: from your perspective, what makes HiJiffy’s culture what it is today?
Ana Correia (01:58): For me, HiJiffy is a great example of what it is to build a company from scratch based on culture. I always say that HiJiffy is like a motto, and we all have this sense that we all fight for the same thing and want the same thing. We’re in different teams, each of us has our own job description, we all do different things, but we always have this common ground, and we know where we want to go and we always find a way to reach it.
I also think there’s a very strong sense at HiJiffy that there is no such thing as an invalid idea. This is one of the things I cherish the most about working here: you’re always empowered to suggest an idea. There’s no such thing as “we’ve always done it this way, so this is the way we’re going to keep doing it.” I feel like ideas are always welcome, and that the teams will do the more they can to make sure your idea goes ahead and actually delivers. For me, that’s great. Looking back, everything you’ve put a pin on came from you and was an idea that your team worked on together with you, and for me that’s one of the greatest things that shows the culture of HiJiffy. I feel that everyone knows they can contribute and bring value regardless of their seniority or their role; everyone can chip in and make a difference. That, for me, is very important.
Tiago Araújo (03:55): Yeah, that’s great to hear as a founder, because it’s so important in terms of innovation, right? If we want to innovate, we really need everyone, especially people who are customer-facing and involved in the next steps of our product.
Talking a little bit about product, something I find important to know, and I’m very curious about your answer: as you mentioned, you’ve been with HiJiffy for quite a while already, reaching five years, and a lot of things have changed in your role. In the very beginning you even onboarded clients, so you’ve had the full view of the full customer journey, the customer being HiJiffy’s client. Where do you feel the most common “aha!” moments are that clients have with our product?
Ana Correia (04:54): This is a good question, actually, because I feel that some of our clients, when they join, especially in the beginning, there was always some resistance, because five years ago technology and software in hotels was definitely not the same as it is today. I feel like today it’s needed, but five years ago it was a bit more of a nice-to-have. Starting with the client from the moment of onboarding, from setting up, and then from the first business review, three or four months in, and showing the client, “Look at how many conversations you had and how little your team members had to intervene.” And there’s always, from the client side, “But how? How does that happen?” Well, that happens because this is what we’re here to do, right? This is what HiJiffy is supposed to do. You’re supposed to give your guest-facing roles more time to be with the guest, as we were speaking about just before, and not have them wasting time with repetitive questions like “where is the pool”, “what time is breakfast”, “what time is this and that”.
Because, as you know, I have eight years of background in the hospitality industry, and I always say to my clients, I wish that back then there was a technology like this. It’s so busy at the front desk and in reservations, and you keep getting calls, and you don’t really have time to be with your guests, to be present and actually know about them, get to know them, and then give them these wow moments that are a part of the guest’s stay. And with HiJiffy they can do just that. It’s great on that part, the conversations and how much the chatbot answers these more common questions, or even not-so-common ones, because we grew as well, with Aplysia 3 and everything we’re working on for the future.
Also on the part of guest communications and everything we can do through WhatsApp, and our clients, the hotel side, not needing to send automated messages one by one, this is great. And also everything that has to do with direct bookings. I feel like the biggest aha! moment is “wow, the amount of direct bookings I can actually get that are related to having HiJiffy’s chatbots across our channels, and this amount of revenue, is insane.” I always feel this is a part where our clients are always surprised to see, “Wow, okay, there’s value to this.” All the things our product can do, nowadays more than five years ago, are just very, very useful. Whenever we do these business reviews and show the results, when you see the results like this, how much time have you saved, how many direct reservations, how many direct bookings, how many campaigns were sent, and how did that help in the guest journey, it’s a big aha! moment for our clients, and that’s one of the things I like the most.
Tiago Araújo (08:23): Yeah, and amazing to see how passionate you are about these aha! moments. I love it.
Ana Correia (08:28): I mean, that’s the coolest part of being guest-facing: when you’re with your clients and you show the results, and you always try to make sure it’s better the next quarter, and better and better, and that we deliver. And everything new that we do, we get this information and we already think, “This client will benefit from this, and this client will benefit from that, so let me go and chat with them and see how we can implement it.” So yeah, this is the coolest part, I would say.
Tiago Araújo (09:07): Awesome. To wrap things up, Ana, what’s your proudest moment at HiJiffy?
Ana Correia (09:14): This is actually my proudest, well, I don’t have a single proudest moment, but my proudest moment happens twice a year, and you’ll laugh at this, but this is the most honest I can be. You know that we meet twice a year, the whole company. And there’s always this moment where we take a team picture, and it’s always you, “Okay, everybody, let’s get together for the team picture.” When we gather together and start to pose for the picture, I always do this, I look back. And I see that there are 60 of us, and I always remember my first quarterly meeting, as we used to call them, when there were 20 of us. We were still wearing our white polos. And every single time we meet twice a year and I look back and see how the team is growing, for me that’s my proudest moment at HiJiffy. I’m lucky to experience this moment twice a year, because it’s really amazing how much we’ve grown, and to be a part of that, and to look back and think about the white polos, the old logo, how the 20 people we were could fit in just a room, and now we have offices in so many other places and there are 60 of us all around Europe. For me, that makes me very, very proud.
Tiago Araújo (10:52): Amazing. And adding on top of that, now we have stickers and socks. That’s another one.
Ana Correia (10:56): Yeah, that is also my favourite part, because the socks, for me, were the highlight of the past five years. Very cool merch, but the socks are the best.
Tiago Araújo (11:10): Thank you so much, Ana, for joining. This was amazing.
Ana Correia (11:12): Thank you very much, Tiago. It was really nice to chat with you. Thank you.
