Sonder finds a secure and privacy-centric operational hub with Persona
Sonder is a next-gen hospitality company with over 5,000 spaces in 28 cities across 6 countries. As it reinvents the hotel experience, Sonder prioritizes trust and safety for its community. As part of this effort, Sonder requires identity verification during the booking process to prevent fraud and comply with developer requirements and city-specific regulations.
Sonder needed a solution for seamless ID verification that would be fast and convenient for their guests and their trust and safety team. In a world where sensitive data has become a liability, Sonder sought a provider that would prioritize its users’ data privacy and the secure storage, managing, and handling of that data while also saving them time by automating manual processes. Persona’s flexible retention policy and GDPR and CCPA compliance were critical, and Persona’s ability to act as Sonder’s PII custodian and store all of the sensitive data was paramount.
Persona’s Dashboard provided what Sonder’s trust and safety team had been looking for: a centralized location to manage ID verification for its bookings. Review and decisioning processes, reviewer notes, and guest account information that would have otherwise been distributed across different systems and tools were now unified in the Persona Dashboard. Through Workflows and Cases, Persona was also able to help Sonder automate their processes. With Workflows, Sonder set up rules to automatically organize inquiries that may require manual review (e.g., flag expired government IDs) and funnel them into cases for easy task assignment
Lastly, as a consumer-facing business, Sonder cared deeply about offering a beautiful and seamless experience for their guests. They wanted to make sure guests did not feel removed from Sonder’s branded experience when verifying their ID, and that clicks were minimized to reduce friction. Persona provided a branded, out of the box experience at a level that met the Sonder team’s high bar for functional design.
By implementing Persona, Sonder was able to reduce customer service tickets and general customer confusion around the identity verification process, resulting in significant time savings for the Sonder team:
