ALICE Achieves Level I Global Support Certification

This week, ALICE earned Hotel Tech Report’s level I 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.

“Maxine Karlinsky, ALICE’s VP of Customer Success, and the ALICE success team have taken a unique hybrid approach where they’ve built both scalable processes to service the mass market while also having a professional services team who serves as a SWAT team to take charge of more personalized needs of larger more demanding clients.  A major value add of working with ALICE, from a service perspective, is the fact that they infuse their domain expertise throughout the product to help you save time and learn from industry best practices. From initial onboarding, where your system will come turnkey with templates and reports based on similar properties with similar standards, all the way through delivering custom projects for teams, ALICE has support to help customers with their specific use cases. Hoteliers who choose to work with ALICE will be able to tell right from the start that the level of thought, professionalism and expertise that their team, product and processes exude is as valuable as the product itself.” - Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

"At ALICE, we’ve learned that to give real customer service we must add something which cannot be bought or measured, and that is caring and integrity. People don’t care unless they know you care - that is why we offer the best tools and the best service to the best people on earth: hoteliers. Here at ALICE customer service is a team sport - and we are stronger for it. It isn’t an interruption, it is our purpose. The hotel that contacts us with a concern isn’t an outsider, that hotel customer is not a visitor to our business - that hotel is part of us and is our business." - Madelyn DePrey, Senior Director of Customer Success

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

ALICE's GCSC Assessment Summary 

• Rubric Score: 24/34

• Certification Level: Level I

• Customer Orientation: Customer Minded

• Recommendation: Recommended

• Support Team Size: 16

• Support Team Leaders: Maxine Karlinsky, VP Customer Success, [email protected]

• Certification Period: December 1, 2020-December 1, 2021

• Support Stack: Salesforce, Wootric, Amazon QuickSight, Appcues, Google Slides, Jira

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 ALICE 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 ALICE 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 & Spanish)

• 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.

• 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 ALICE 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.

• 4.10 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 ALICE 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 excellent customer support ratings averaging more than 4.0/5 across all client reviews.

• 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/