Travel technology company iZento has released a new product, iZento Quality Control Service, that will help agencies using ClientBase to analyze their agents’ Res Cards, pointing out errors and omissions and highlighting areas where further education may be necessary.
For the past eight years, iZento has been providing products to travel agents, president Judy Roberts said. Its “flagship service” is iZento Professional, which allows agents to subscribe for a monthly fee of $15 per agent and input data about a client’s trip. iZento then takes that data and uses it to build customized itineraries, including calendars, agendas, ads from the agent or agency, maps and destination content.
The itineraries can then be shared with the client digitally, and are also suitable to be printed. The digital versions can be changed and edited at any time. A live link will allow clients to see the updates as they are made. Roberts said agents should take advantage of the ability to change the itinerary by putting in recommendations, ads and more, and urging their clients to review the new information.
“What we think we can really bring to the marketplace is the ability for the agents to do upselling and marketing and advertising in ways that they haven’t done before,” she said.
More recently, the company introduced its ClientBase-iZento Connector, which allows agents using the popular client relationship management tool ClientBase (a Sabre product) to automatically import data from Res Cards to build itineraries. Res Cards are essentially a profile for each client replete with trip details. The connector has a $150 initial setup fee, and agencies are charged based on how many Res Cards are processed each year, starting at $75 per month.
Now, iZento has released its Quality Control Service, a natural next step that analyzes agents’ Res Cards for errors and/or omissions, making for a more complete itinerary.
“As we got into this a year and a half ago, one of the big surprises for us was, in all honesty, the integrity of the Res Card data,” Roberts said.
By analyzing Res Card data, she said agency owners can answer the questions, “How good is my data, and really, what can I do about it?”
iZento will put the quality control software in an agency’s ClientBase system. It then collects data on every Res Card in the system, and reports errors and omissions back to the agency owners. Roberts noted many errors and omissions are not the fault of agent.
“A lot of the problems on the Res Cards are not because agents are doing bad work,” she said. “A lot of the data is imported. There are different systems … and some of that data is just flawed. It needs to be corrected."
Once the numbers are crunched, a report to an agency owner will include overall what is missing — for instance, an agency might be missing multiple departing cities for tour itineraries, as well as tour arrival and departure dates. This could indicate education is needed in inputting tours, Roberts said. The report also includes an agent-by-agent breakdown of what each is missing. Agents also receive emails including what is missing from each of their Res Cards, and how to fix it.
“They are going to have better data, more complete data. It’s going to be comprehensive — sort of an ‘everybody wins,’” Roberts said. “I mean, there’s nothing better than a booking that’s correct, and this is certainly what we’re trying to help the agencies accomplish."
The Quality Control Service has a $100 setup fee, with a $50-per-month fee, per agency, after that.
“The agency owners are really excited about it because now, not only do they know what’s wrong, but they know what to do about it,” Roberts said.