Amadeus North America this month announced the July appointment of former senior vice president of e-commerce Scott Gutz as COO, after he completed the yearlong Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership.
Gutz now oversees the region's customer support, product development, training, delivery services, contract management and internal IT. Gutz plans to broaden some customer service and support solutions used in the United States to the rest of the Americas, transition some of the region's internal IT systems onto globally consolidated technology platforms, such as customer relationship management and automated training systems, and provide new travel agency service tools that reduce the reliance on Amadeus for some software programming.
"The idea is, can we take what we have developed in other parts of the world, translate it into other languages and localize it by centralizing the development of programs?" Gutz said.
In November, Amadeus will launch a program script library that enables its customers' IT teams to manage some internal programming and technology implementations, Gutz said. In the first quarter of 2009, Amadeus plans to implement a Web-based search engine support solution, reducing the need for phone support from the Amadeus helpdesk. During the next 12 months, a standardized global customer relationship management system will be deployed so the company can decrease resolution times and route support calls to any of its service centers.
Meanwhile, Gutz now is responsible for garnering new third-party technology and service providers to increase airfare and rate-loading accuracy, and will work on migrating airline customers to the new technology stack by "building all of the new solutions into the agreements going forward."
Also this month, former Expedia vice president of the Americas Joff Romoff joined Amadeus in the new position of vice president of sales, directing agency distribution efforts in the United States, Canada, Guam and Micronesia. In July, Amadeus added IBM veteran Dwayne Ingram as executive vice president of the multinational customer group for the Americas and unveiled plans to centralize some Chicago operations
(BTNonline, Aug. 11).