Vipservice is more than its reputation

On 17 June, Vipservice launched a dedicated Facebook page for Commercial development – one of the company's main areas of focus. Irina Solovyova, Executive Director of Vipservice, believes this step is very fitting: the company has collected enough experience and projects in the area to share it with the professional community. In our interview, Irina went into more detail regarding the objectives of the new page.

Irina, what made you think about creating the Vipservice Technology page?

– Beaumarchais' Figaro very wisely asked: "What if I were better than my reputation?" I've quoted this a lot at Vipservice over the past 5 years. Here's why.

Our reputation is consistent: Vipservice is the leading ticket seller in Russia. We've gained this position through honest work and we prove it every year. The number of air tickets that goes through our hands in a year is comparable to the capacity of entire countries! We currently sell slightly more tickets than Thailand and slightly less than PeruJ But there is another side to this success – our reputation is becoming too "tight" for us.

5 years ago, we broadened it by automating the process of selling railway tickets, and proved that it's not just air tickets that we can successfully sell. 3 years ago, we looked at hotel business and started working on our own hotel aggregator, HotelStar.

So I keep saying that we are bigger and better than our reputation. We have developed a serious developer expertise.

Going back to the reason why we've created the new page, I'd like to finish my answer just like I started it, with the quote by Beaumarchais. We need this page to tell people that Vipservice is NOT JUST a ticket seller. 

What kind of technology is the page going to talk about?

– Our IT history started with instruments for issuing tickets. Over 5 years ago we launched Portbilet, and today it's one of the most reputable ticket systems on the market. Our clients use it for over 6 hours a day, and the total number of user accounts is currently over 40 thousand. This is our flagship project and we are very proud of it. We used an outsourced developer for creating this system. And this project has made us more independent. Our current ticket system for corporate businesses was created by our own team.

Another important point for our development is the automation of business processes. We are proud to have our own CRM system, the backbone of our work with subagents. It facilitates all stages of working with clients, from contracting and tracking client history, to console orders and working with ADM. The CRM system will soon become international – our expansion strategy involves creating English and German language versions of it.

Another system we couldn't live without is Business analytics. That's what "quantitative" manager decisions are based on. It uses a lot of outside solutions (Pentaho, Qlik Sense) but they've all been "tweaked" to our company's specifics by our own experts.

In two weeks, we are launching another online project – hotel aggregator HotelStar. Hotels generate a significant amount of income for our two core businesses, corporate and subagent. To implement this project, we started working with remote developers, something we've never done before: we hired specialists from technologically advanced parts of Russia. We are planning to keep this trend going: finding and training new valuable employees based in other cities, countries and even on other continents. The Vipservice Technology page will serve this purpose as well.

Technology is not just a nice word for us. Investing in the development of IT and technology solutions is our second largest expenditure after employee salaries. We do this for our clients, for ourselves, and because there's no way we can not do it. We honestly hope that Vipservice Technology will be an interesting, exciting and useful resource for every follower. And perhaps one day it will earn a round of applause!