IDeaS Achieves Level IV Global Support Certification

This week, IDeaS earned Hotel Tech Report’s Level IV Global Customer Support Certification (GCSC) for its heavy investments into tools, processes and strategies to ensure the ongoing success of its customers across all four of the 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.

“When Sanjay and Ravi founded IDeaS in 1989, spreadsheets were in their early days, datasets were disparate and it was widely accepted that revenue management in hotels was to be based on gut feelings.  As the category creator, its not suprising that thirty years later where IDeaS' support and success operation really stands out is in their tireless efforts to educate hoteliers across the globe with a constant stream of educational content and high touch service.  What's also really unique is the sophistication of IDeaS' success monitoring for clients which includes a proprietary simulation system that runs real world parallel simulations of scenarios with no RMS in place and simpler automated revenue management tools to make sure their clients can clearly see the tangible benefits and ROI of their IDeaS investment.  This is the gold standard when it comes to educating clients on product value and something every company wishes they could implement--but only a company with IDeaS' technical wherewithal, extensive resources and 30-year track record can really execute on.  Hotels who investment in IDeaS' software therefore don't just get a product, but they get expertise and education that makes their entire organization more revenue saavy and profitable and that's something that shouldn't be underestimated when considering IDeaS as a partner.” Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

"Our constant commitment is not only to equip clients with the most advanced revenue management technology and analytics, but also provide the ongoing support, training and education needed to successfully use these tools to grow profits for their unique properties." Sanjay Nagalia, Co-Founder and COO

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

IDeaS' GCSC Assessment Summary 

• Rubric Score: 34/34

• Certification Level: IV

• Customer Orientation: Customer Centric

• Recommendation: Highly Recommended

• Support Team Size: 150+

• Support Team Leaders: Heidi Albignac, Vice President, Client Operations

• Certified Since: November 6, 2019

• Valid Through: December 9, 2022

• Support Stack: Intellum, Salesforce, Qualtrics, WalkMe, Bright Idea

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 IDeaS has in place for clients:

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

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

• In-app guided tours: Vendor offers in-app guided tours that are embedded within their interface to provide coaching and education for users to organically discover and easily access while using the product.

• Tooltips: Vendor offers helpful tips and hints presented when users hover over buttons and UI elements in the interface. (min of 10 in-app tooltips)

• 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.

• Proprietary data recommendations: Vendor aggregates product usage data across clients to benchmark performance and provide recommendations to their users to help them learn about best practices, make better decisions and maximize product utilization.

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 IDeaS has in place for clients:

• 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.

• 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)

• Multi-lingual support: Vendor offers support in the languages where they have active clients

• 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.

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

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

• 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.

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

• Verified Contract SLA monitoring: Vendor has SLA terms fully integrated into their customer support software that has automatic notifications ensuring that SLA's are monitored and upheld.

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 IDeaS has in place for clients:

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

• Managed Services: Vendor offers additional consulting and managed services to help clients maximize their usage of the product.

• Learning Management System (LMS): Vendo has a Learning Management System in place that offers videos, guided trainings and assessments for customers to be able to expand product knowledge in a structured way over time.

• Product certifications: Vendor offers certifications which allow users to have a structured path to becoming a product expert which can be leveraged in their career to strengthen their resume.

• Online community: Vendor offers and online community for customers that allows users to engage with each other as well as targeted content in a contextualized setting to enable self-service discovery and problem solving.

• Customer conference: Vendor produces an in-person or online user conference to build a community, share product updates and educate users on best practices.

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 IDeaS has in place for clients:

• Extraordinary Public Feedback Validation: Vendor shows exemplary client relationships and is a top performer on Hotel Tech Report with more than 200 verified client reviews.

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

• 4.9 Dedicated customer success monitoring software: Vendor utilizes dedicated customer success software to monitor product usage and coach users to succeed with the product.

• 4.13 Vendor Confidence: The vendor has revealed their private internal customer satisfaction scores to Hotel Tech Report showing high degrees of confidence in their support infrastructure and outcomes which can be a strong indicator of transparency and positive vendor-client relationships.

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/