Solve Support Snags with Tailored POS Service Agreements

The need for timely and competent technical support will always be strong in the hospitality industry. However given this high demand, many believe that point of sale (POS) vendor support leaves much to be desired. Many industries that are highly leveraged with technology use service level agreements (SLAs) to define and enforce technical support services. Though not widely used in the hospitality industry, SLAs are a powerful tool that hotels can use to improve the quality of customer support required to conduct business and make vendors accountable for their performance.

Modern hotel POS systems are complex, integrated, distributed systems whose role continues to grow as vendors add functionality. Although this would seem to suggest that POS systems are a fertile ground for all types of systems headaches, this is not necessarily the case for a couple of reasons. First, POS technology has matured to the point where core hardware and software have been commoditized. Bugs have been fixed and development tools and techniques have advanced in ways that fewer bugs end up in production than ever before. Second, although problems still occur, the tools available to diagnose and troubleshoot them have also improved. Today's problems are usually with non-core functionality like infrastructure, communication, interfaces and new features. Yet, relative to these developments, vendor support has not kept pace.

"Please hold for assistance"
The types of problems that I am referring to are not about lost terminal assignments, crashes or jammed printers. They are about the long hold times or excessive delays that occur before callbacks and recurring problems are worked on, resolved, or in some cases, completely forgotten about until they happen again.

The problem with conventional support agreements is that although they may be well intentioned, they frequently omit important details regarding performance, contingencies and remedies. SLAs, on the other hand, lay out in black and white, the detailed specifics of a support offering. Without getting into the legalese, the gist of an SLA could state something like: 

"For critical issues such as a down system, 24 x 7, the support line will be answered within six rings. Hold or callback time will not exceed 2 minutes. A support technician will attempt to resolve your incident over the phone or online. If determined that the incident cannot be resolved online or over the phone, a technician will be dispatched and will arrive on site within 2 hours..."

A key benefit of an SLA over a more casual support plan is that SLAs are implemented with tracking and reporting systems that maintain information about incidents, performance metrics (such as hold and callback times) and notes taken by support personnel. This data then becomes available for reporting. If a customer has an issue with the way an incident was handled, a report can easily be generated that supports the facts of the incident.

A good service level agreement will detail the following points:

• What the vendor is promising
• How the vendor will deliver on those promises
• Who will measure performance/delivery, and how
• What happens if the vendor fails to deliver as promised

SLAs are also customizable. A vendor can offer varying levels of response at tiered rates. SLAs for critical problems such as down systems would be more stringent and more expensive than for non-business critical incidents.

Agreement tips
Why does the hospitality industry not use SLAs? There are several possible explanations for this: operators aren't aware of them, they're considered too expensive, or your vendor doesn't offer them. Because the solution to vendor support issues is largely pre-emptive an operator's greatest leverage for negotiating an appropriate and effective support agreement is during the RFP process for a new system, a conversion or an upgrade. Here are a few thoughts to keep in mind:

• Require formal service level agreements for support.
• Negotiate a support plan that's tiered to accommodate the varying levels of response you'll need for critical and non-critical incidents.
• Read between the lines of the contract to understand what's missing. Your leverage for getting timely, reasonably priced changes to your configuration or support plan diminishes to zero once you've signed the contract.
• Make sure that the vendor remains on the hook for sporadic or recurring problems and commits to resolving them in a reasonable period of time. You should never have to have a permanent workaround in place to compensate for broken functionality.
• Require periodic technical support performance reports from your vendor.
• Train your staff to accommodate the inevitable lapses in vendor support. After all, an SLA doesn't guarantee support. It just gives the vendor greater incentive to provide it to your satisfaction.

Joel Bragen is a veteran hospitality systems consultant with over seventeen years' experience in systems management and operations. He has served as an advisor, implementer, strategist and project manager to a wide range of high-caliber clientele including Millennium Partners, Doral Hotels and Resorts, Dolce International and Benchmark Hospitality.A graduate of the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, Joel has held Microsoft Certified Professional and Microsoft Certified Product Specialist certifications and has worked as a Certified Technical Trainer with Executrain. For questions or comments, Joel can be reached at [email protected].