Optii Achieves Level II Global Support Certification

This week, Optii earned Hotel Tech Report’s level II Global Customer Support Certification (GCSC) for its investments into tools, processes and strategies to ensure the ongoing success of its customers across the four key pillars of the GCSC Rubric including: pre-emptive support, reactive support, coaching and customer validation.

The Hotel Tech Report GCSC certification program analyzes software vendors along critical dimensions of customer support infrastructure in order to help hoteliers minimize risk and maximize positive outcomes when selecting technology partners.  In order to become certified, companies must open their internal systems to Hotel Tech Report for assessment along HTR’s rigorous 34-point GCSC Rubric.

“The Optii team is hyper focused on developing support processes tailored to their users’ needs.  Optii not only offers 24/7 support to cater to less tech savvy housekeeping users, but the team also delivers quarterly business reviews for managers where the team presents data visualizations and analysis showing how they can improve their efficiency,” Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

“We work in an industry whose sole objective is to provide outstanding service, working with professionals who can smell bad service from a mile away. In addition, the incumbent gorillas are known for bad service. By providing prompt, efficient and knowledgeable support and general assistance, we are therefore able to stand out and instil a sense of loyalty in all of our customers," say Soenke Weiss, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Optii.

The below GCSC assessment outlines the verified systems and processes that Optii has in place to educate, train, retain and support customers.

Optii's GCSC Assessment Summary 

• Rubric Score: 21/34

• Certification Level: Level II

• Customer Orientation: Customer Minded

• Recommendation: Recommended

• Support Team Size: 6

• Support Team Leaders: Chris Eales & Liz Sherstad

• Certification Period: September 14, 2020 - September 14, 2021

• Support Stack: Hubspot, SmartSheet

GCSC Support Rubric Section I: Pre-Emptive Support 

The Pre-Emptive support pillar of the GSCG Scoring Rubric audits the tools and processes the vendor has in place to provide customers with easy access to self-help resources.  These self-help resources serve as a basis to offer easy troubleshooting as well as to preempt answers to product related questions before they arise providing a more intuitive and seamless experience for clients.  The following are the rubric items that Hotel Tech Report has verified that Optii has in place for clients:

• 1.1 Online knowledge base/help center: Vendor offers a searchable help center for customers to easily find answers to common customer questions.

• 2.1 Online training videos: Vendor offers pre-recorded videos that clients can access 24/7 for self-teaching and deeper product knowledge.

• 4.1 Implementation documentation/roadmap: Vendor offers clients a visual map of the steps, processes and stakeholders upon onboarding to ensure that all stakeholders are aligned to make the implementation process more seamless.

GCSC Support Rubric Section II: Reactive Support 

The Reactive Support Pillar assesses the company's responsiveness to clients and their ability to resolve issues quickly when they arise ensuring prompt response and service to clients.  The following are the rubric items that Hotel Tech Report has verified that Optii has in place for clients:

• 1.2 Transparent process: Vendor has opened up their systems to Hotel Tech Report via screen share to verify their tools and processes in place to deliver customer support.

• 1.3 Email support or phone support: Vendor at least one of the traditional methods of customer support channels, email or phone support (additional channels: phone, chat, email)

• 1.4 Multi-lingual support: Vendor offers support in the languages where they have active clients (English, French, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, German, Bulgarian, Russian, Czech, Belorusian, Xhosa, Swedish, Norwegian, Slovak, Portuguese, Chinese, Romanian, Taiwanese) 

• 1.5 Purpose built support and ticket management tool: Vendor utilizes professional customer support software that has functionality to effectively manage support tickets, followup, escalations and analytics.

• 2.2 Live Chat support: Vendor offers website or in-app live chat as an alternative customer support channel.

• 3.3 Contract SLAs: Vendor has service level agreement (SLA) terms in place in client contracts to guarantee that service levels are upheld.

• 3.5 Feature request tracking: Vendor offers the ability for clients to easily submit feature requests and has a methodology in place for escalating high priority features.

• 4.4 24/7 support availability: Vendor offers 24/7 support to clients for around the clock assistance.

GCSC Support Rubric Section III: Customer Success & Coaching

While keeping customers happy is commonly thought of by software companies as the top priority, keeping them well informed is of equal importance. The third pillar of the GCSC Rubric identifies the key ways that vendors inform, educate and train their customers to realize successful outcomes with their products.  The following are the rubric items that Hotel Tech Report has verified that Optii has in place for clients:

• 1.7 Customer satisfaction monitoring (ex. NPS surveys, CSAT): Vendor has processes in place to regularly monitor customer satisfaction.

• 2.3 Product updates/changes (release notes/changelog): Vendor offers easily accessible robust documentation of feature updates and product improvements to educate clients on new ways to maximize usage of the product.

• 2.4 Quarterly success check ins: Vendor offers [at least] quarterly customer success check ins to review progress, share best practices and ensure that clients are successful and happy with the product or service.

• 3.6 Performance reporting: Vendor offers reporting and analytics to show clients the value of the product or service.

GCSC Support Rubric Section IV: Customer Validation

The GCSC’s 34-point rubric and Hotel Tech Report’s verification of internal tools and processes validate the vendor's systems in place; however, the validation of the success of these tools and processes can most significantly be validated by the unbiased perspectives of real hotelier customers.  This pillar looks at unbiased verified client reviews and satisfaction scores to validate that the processes in place are working in the eyes of customers based on their satisfaction ratings.  The following are the rubric items that Hotel Tech Report has verified that Optii has in place for clients:

• 2.6 Public Feedback Validation: Vendor shows positive client relationships on Hotel Tech Report with more than 10 verified client reviews.

• 4.12 4.5 avg. customer support rating: Vendor has outstanding customer support ratings averaging more than 4.5/5 across all client reviews.

About the Hotel Tech Report Global Customer Support Certification (GCSC)

Support is one of the most critical aspects of the vendor selection process and yet historically there has never been a way to know the quality of a company’s support, until now. Using Hotel Tech Report’s proprietary framework, companies are assessed along four key dimensions: pre-emptive support, reactive support, coaching/success and client validation to provide hoteliers unprecedented levels of transparency to more easily identify top technology partners.

For more information please visit: https://partners.hoteltechreport.com/global-support-certification/

ABOUT OPTII

America. Optii, headquartered in Austin, TX and with offices in London and Brisbane, is a hotel operations solution that leverages smarter technologies such as artificial intelligence, analytics, messaging and mobility to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of housekeeping and service delivery departments. Optii operates in real-time and allows hotels to streamline operations, reduce costs and enhance the guest experience in proven and tangible ways, without requiring capital expenditure and complex integrations. Optii is backed by Thayer Ventures and used by hotels across the world including La Cantera and The Don Cesar in the United States, Okada Manilla Resort & Casino, Le Meridien, IHG and more.