This week, M3, one of hospitality's premiere cloud-based accounting, financial and data management platforms in North America, 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.

“One thing that stood out right off the bat was M3’s transparency in their average satisfaction ratings on their customer support inbound tickets which across hundreds of monthly tickets maintain an average satisfaction rating over 95%. On the customer success side of things M3 one of rubric items that really stood out was their robust feature request tracking that shows they are listening closely to customers to leverage feedback to improve the product and also their customer forum that enables customers to collaborate, share best practices and help each other get even more value out of the product.” Hotel Tech Report co-founder Adam Hollander.

"Technology moves at a breakneck pace, and hoteliers can’t afford to lose time troubleshooting their back-office solutions. To help maximize customer success, M3 takes an intentional approach to customer support by prioritizing timely, transparent and effective assistance for our entire product suite,” said Allen Read, President of M3. “We measure support success solely through customer satisfaction reports, which consistently report over 95% satisfaction. Our dedicated customer success managers work with more than 20 in-house support specialists to ensure our products are helping customers get back to managing their hotels and increasing bottom lines.” Allen Read, CEO at M3

The below GCSC assessment outlines the verified systems and processes that M3 has in place to educate, train, retain and support customers.

M3's GCSC Assessment Summary

Rubric Score: 20/34

Certification Level: Level I

Customer Orientation: Customer Minded

Recommendation: Recommended

Support Team Size: 28

Support Team Leaders: Mark Iannacone, VP of Customer Support/Success

Certification Period: October 2021 - October 2022

Support Stack: Microsoft Dynamics, Survey Monkey, One Note, Aha!, Qwilr

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 M3 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 M3 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.

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.

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 M3 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.

4.8 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.

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 M3 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 4/5 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/.

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