This week Sojern, the digital marketing platform built for travel, earned Hotel Tech Report’s Level III Global Customer Support Certification (GCSC) for its investments into tools, processes and strategies that ensure the ongoing success of its customers. Hotel Tech Report scored Sojern across four of the key pillars of the GCSC Rubric: pre-emptive support, reactive support, coaching and customer validation.

The Hotel Tech Report GCSC 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 a rigorous 34-point GCSC Rubric.

“Sojern is both a product and service company when it comes to digital travel marketing, and their support and success infrastructure shows it. Their team has meticulously mapped out their user journey from embedded in-product onboarding through to real-time support routing to ensure that they deliver consistent and personalized service for their clients. Any hotels that choose to partner with Sojern, from independents up to enterprise multi-property brands and portfolios, can rest assured that they will be in good hands. Sojern’s team will be there to help them succeed as a long-term partner,” Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

"We appreciate the recognition from Hotel Tech Report. While Sojern's thousands of hotel clients come to Sojern for our multichannel marketing platform's ability to drive direct bookings, they often site our customer-centric approach as a key reason they stay. Hoteliers need highly responsive, expert service to get their questions answered fast, so they can get back to providing the best customer experience for their guests. I am proud of our team's ability to combine world-class performance and service to drive our customers' success and satisfaction," said Noreen Henry, Chief Revenue Officer at Sojern.

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

Sojern's GCSC Assessment Summary 

• Rubric Score: 25/33

• Certification Level: Level III

• Customer Orientation: Customer Centric

• Recommendation: Highly recommended

• Support Team Size: 72

• Support Team Leaders: Kate Burton (Director Customer Experience), Brent Brummer (BS&O & Global Client Success Practice Leader), Noreen Henry (CRO)

• Certification Period: September 2022 - September 2023

• Support Stack: Appcues, Salesforce, Get Feedback, Zendesk, Aha

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 Sojern 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)

• 4.1 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 Sojern 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.

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 Sojern 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 Sojern has in place for clients:

• 3.7 Public Feedback Validation: Vendor shows exemplary client relationships and is a top performer on Hotel Tech Report with more than 50 verified client reviews.

• 4.12 4.8-star 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 Sojern

Sojern (www.sojern.com) provides digital marketing solutions for the travel industry. Powered by artificial intelligence and traveler intent data, Sojern activates multi-channel marketing solutions to drive direct demand. More than 10,000 hotels, attractions, tourism boards and travel marketers rely on Sojern to engage and convert travelers around the world.