SiteMinder Achieves Level III Global Support Certification

This week, SiteMinder earned Hotel Tech Report’s level III Global Customer Support Certification (GCSC) for its investments into tools, processes and strategies to ensure the ongoing success of its customers across the 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.

“What’s really unique about SiteMinder’s support organization is their ability to not just provide their product, but also their expertise, data and market knowledge to help clients succeed. Their sheer scale allows them to collect mounds and mounds of market data that they skillfully leverage and turn into insights that they package and deliver to clients through things like bespoke ‘recommendation packs’ and local market updates to help clients get the most value out of being a SiteMinder client which is something that very few companies have the wherewithal or scale to deliver,” says Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

"Your technology will only carry you so far. It’s the service that you provide to customers that keeps a business strong. Knowing this, SiteMinder has had an unrelenting commitment to customer service from day one, and our responsive and global approach is something that we are proud of. Our teams are dispersed throughout the world. We cover phone support in each of the 11 languages that we operate in and make our products available in eight of those languages, so that despite being a global business, we are also a truly local player to our hotel customers," says Sankar Narayan, CEO at SiteMinder.

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

SiteMinder's GCSC Assessment Summary 

• Rubric Score: 27/34

• Certification Level:III

• Customer Orientation: Customer Focused

• Recommendation: Highly recommended

• Support Team Size: 145

• Support Team Leaders: Vinnie Panicker VP, Global Support

• Certification Period: February 15, 2020 - February 15, 2021

• Support Stack: ProductBoard, Intercom, Google Slides, Wistia, Atlassian, GetFeedback, alteryx, Tableau, Salesforce

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 SiteMinder 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.

• 3.1 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.

• 3.2 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)

• 4.2 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 SiteMinder 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

• 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.

• 4.5 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 SiteMinder 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.

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

• 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.

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 SiteMinder has in place for clients:

• 4.11 Public Feedback Validation: Vendor shows exemplary client relationships and is a top performer on Hotel Tech Report with more than 100 verified client reviews.

• 2.5 4-star avg. customer support rating: Vendor has outstanding customer support ratings averaging more than 4.0/5 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.