In short, CloudVO has sorted the wheat from the weeds and carefully vetted the close to 1,000 locations in our network. That’s a good start. But there are simple things you still need to do.
There are approximately 35,000 flexible office and coworking spaces around the world and over 10,000 in the US and Canada alone. The operators come in different shapes, designs, concepts, and operational strengths, with some being mostly focused on small private offices, others with a large inventory of team rooms, and some with more of an open coworking bend.
A majority of booking nowadays takes place online without even touring the space. How do you know what to expect? How do you differentiate between well-managed operators and those you may want to stay away from? How do you know the Quality of Service you can expect?
CloudVO has done some of the filtering for you:
- By only selecting partners in the network that satisfy the highest criteria of amenities and customer satisfaction – poor performers are not invited or are requested to leave.
- By requiring our partners to maintain amenities that guarantees a professional experience, including plenty of bandwidth, wifi, furnished rooms, on-site staff, fully equipped meeting rooms, and more.
- By being transparent on who our local partners are. Beware of networks that hide the name or brand of their local partners! Can you imagine booking a room on Hotels.com or Expedia and not knowing if you are booking a Hyatt or a Motel 6?
- By inviting our partners to display their Health & Safety protocol on our website because we believe safety is important today and will remain important in the post-COVID-19 era. We display a safety shield for locations that have uploaded their safety protocol which you can review with ease.
- By being transparent on pricing and terms. The prices are the same if you booked directly with our partners, but in addition, we provide a layer of control of quality standards and monitoring of customer’s experience that benefits our clients and some centralized services, like phone answering, that are extremely efficient. We value full transparency. A prominent live phone answering competitor was recently brought to court for opaque pricing and abuses. Most virtual receptionist services charge by the minute spent by their phone attendant. How do you know? How can you monitor that? See our straightforward pricing approach for phone answering and how it compares to that one competitor who ran into these legal issues.
- By making customer reviews visible and comparing them with our 2 largest competitors, as shown in the graphs below.
Now you may have noticed that the two largest companies in the flexible space industry, Regus and Wework, are not part of the CloudVO network. Well, by looking at their customer reviews and how their customer ratings compare with CloudVO partners, you’ll start to understand why! Our standards are high!
CloudVO Partners Customer Ratings Compared to Regus & WeWork
We started this process with 7 regions, but have since updated to reviews for our 15 biggest markets.
CloudVO has done some of the vetting on your behalf already, but you still need to figure out what location works best for your needs. We recommend going one layer deeper by checking Google and Yelp customer ratings and reviews for the location selected. It’s easy to do and becomes meaningful when the location has at least 10 customer reviews. With fewer reviews, one outlier may give the wrong impression. Here is an example of Pacific Workplaces, a partner and sister company of CloudVO with 18 locations in California and Nevada, displaying those reviews for each of its locations in full transparency. In the future, we plan to encourage all our partners to do something similar.
For more information on how to select the best flexible office space, contact us at CloudVO.
