ATS Aims To Gain Client Satisfaction

<B> ATS Aims To Gain Client Satisfaction</B>

By Mary Ann McNulty



<I>New York</I> - Infused with its first round of venture capital financing, Automated Travel Systems has spent the past six months refining its customer service, tech support, documentation, and research and development to improve customer satisfaction. The positioning is all part of ATS' plan to grow into a much larger company, said David Zeiter, vice president of sales and marketing.

As part of the overhaul, ATS doubled its tech support group, launched "make-it-right" programs for customer service, developed rapid deployment templates to help customers speed implementation of products and overhauled its manuals. It also has standardized its product enhancement schedule to just four to six upgrades a year, instead of the monthly releases it's been delivering to customers, Zeiter said.

The new focus is on evaluating customer satisfaction, and fixing anything that isn't right. As with many small firms, ATS has at times grown too fast to formalize such processes, Zeiter said.

Since its founding in 1990 by Seth Perelman, ATS has been providing more than 30 of the top 50 corporate agencies with a suite of booking and quality control products that include fax, e-mail and Internet access to flight schedules, availability and pricing; point-of-sale quality control tools; and a module to add service fees. All the products are available in both stand-alone and service bureau models.

Last month, ATS released its ResExpert suite on the Amadeus platform, using the GDS' application programming interface. With the release, ATS now offers its products on all four GDSs.

ATS also held its first user group meeting last month. Due to the need for faster product deployment, ATS consolidated and distributed a library of templates and scripts to all its customers.