Quick Base Helps Kayak Coordinate Global Teams and Manage Customer Feedback

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1 Case Study Quick Base Helps Kayak Coordinate Global Teams and Manage Customer Feedback Kayak.com is a travel search engine or meta-search site that provides consumers with comprehensive travel options in one central location. The site sifts through data from more than 100 different travel providers and delivers real-time prices and availability for hundreds of airlines, 100,000+ hotels, and all leading rental car and cruise providers. Since Kayak.com is a travel search engine and not a retailer, it offers objective, unbiased information on rates and availability enables users to avoid high service fees, and benefit from incentives offered on supplier sites such as reward points, upgrades, and more. The Challenge Coordinating global teams and projects was difficult Managing customer feedback needed to be a streamlined team effort Small IT team needed minimal IT hassles The Solution Quick Base gives us a level of speed and flexibility in automating key business processes that we can t get anywhere else. Combined with its cost-effectiveness and outsourced management by Quick Base is a perfect solution for Kayak.com. Lightning fast deployment of custom applications in minutes Robust applications with no IT maintenance challenges Cost-effective solution no upfront investment hurdles The Results Distributed, real-time access to project status for internal and external team members Open communication among outside developers A comprehensive, patent-pending customer-feedback system More efficient operations with open reporting 1

2 Industry Travel Services Website Quick Base Applications Customer Support, Resume Tracking, Distributed Project Management, Issues Management Who s Using Quick Base Jim Giza, director of technology, 85 Kayak team members, and hundreds of external partners who provide travel information to the website. As the Web s new-breed travel-search site, Kayak.com aims to provide the most complete real-time information pricing and availability on flights, hotels, auto rentals, and other travel options to thousands of site visitors each day. With a large majority of the customer service, operations and development work completed at the U.S. headquarters in Concord, MA, there was still a need for an efficient way to coordinate and collaborate with employees and partners in Europe, India, and China. That places a premium on coordinating and managing these distributed teams. Updating and exchanging huge single-user spreadsheets among dozens of people just wasn t an option for us, said Jim Giza, director of technology for Kayak.com. We had too many people who needed visibility into project data and statuses. Our teams need speed and efficiency. Another key area to address: efficiently responding to customer feedback. Kayak.com receives dozens of messages each day. We consider this feedback to be an early-warning window into our customer base, Giza said. For instance, if there s a travel provider who s not performing or if our updated interface isn t working on a Safari browser for Macintosh computers, we need to know those things as soon as possible. With such a diverse range of issues to address, our philosophy is that every Kayak employee is a customer-service rep but we needed an efficient way to get these messages to different employees for them to respond in a timely manner. We outsource our site hosting, so there isn t a lot of internal resources we can tap into. We needed solutions that would be easy and efficient. From its first days as a company, Kayak.com embraced the simplicity and power of Quick Base to automate a variety of business processes and workflows from managing resumes of employee candidates to managing the selection and build-out of its offices. With Quick Base, Kayak. com workgroups and teams can collaborate online through easy yet sophisticated centrally managed applications that boost productivity, streamline workflow, promote visibility and establish accountability. Best of all, Quick Base is a cloud-based platform, so there is no IT infrastructure to buy, deploy, or maintain. We ve been big Quick Base fans from the beginning it s so flexible, you can use it for so many things, Giza said. 2

3 So it wasn t surprising that Giza turned to Quick Base for solutions to mange global projects and customer service issues. With Quick Base, I can develop an idea and have a robust application to automate a key business function in minutes, he said. I can prototype, develop, and deploy at lightning speeds. And there s nothing to deploy or install for users they just go to a Web address and can begin using the system immediately. From an administrative perspective, there s nothing that can touch Quick Base, and since we don t have an IT department, that s an important consideration. Normally these kinds of global applications would require lengthy waits and expenses while you purchase and/or configure servers, firewalls, IP addresses, backup procedures, and those issues. With Quick Base, we re up and running in minutes. Kayak.com relies on Quick Base to help it manage the global internal/ external development experts who build and maintain the company s Web site. We use Quick Base as a rendezvous mechanism where all of our team can check in with their latest status, issues, questions, and other collaborative communications, Giza said. We have hundreds of people sharing this information 24/7 around the world quickly and securely. We can see which partners have done what work and compensate them accordingly. In addition, Giza recalls that, In the past three years, we have successfully commissioned and completed over 100 non-critical path projects with outside developers while relying on Quick Base as the main communication engine - giving us up-to-the-minute status on the progress of each initiative. Giza also used the simple creation/customization capabilities of Quick Base to create a sophisticated customer-service application as well. Yes, I could have bought some wildly expensive customer-management system, he said. But they don t do nearly as much as what I can do with Quick Base. When a customer message comes in, we can automatically analyze its contents and route it to a Kayak person for immediate attention. So Sally gets questions about passwords. Tom gets questions about credit cards. Or Steve gets the questions about hotel sales. Each employee gets a couple of messages a day by and it s all tracked in Quick Base. The recipient gets the , clicks the link, and goes to the Quick Base record where he or she gets complete details about the issue including the thread history. We think our system is so innovative, we even completed a patent application for it. 3

4 Giza was also quick to note the importance of Quick Base s ability to easily work with third-party tools for comprehensive reporting. Yes, we use Quick Base s native reporting features, he said. But we also recognize that Excel is the native tongue of business folks. So we like the openness of Quick Base to push some of our data to other tools for sophisticated charting and graphing. Quick Base gives us a level of speed and flexibility in automating key business processes that we can t get anywhere else. Combined with its costeffectiveness, Quick Base is a perfect solution for Kayak.com. 4

5 About Quick Base Quick Base provides a cloud-based platform that empowers problem solvers to quickly turn ideas for better ways to work into apps that make their organizations more efficient. For nearly 20 years, people of all technical backgrounds have been using the Quick Base platform to create solutions that streamline processes, capture real-time data, and improve company operations, all while working in concert with existing IT systems. Based in Cambridge, MA and a former division of Intuit, Quick Base has a 6,000+ customer universe of app-enabled businesses that spans all industries and company sizes, and includes more than half of the Fortune 100. For more information, please visit: