Pan-Euro Call Centers Ahead

<B> Pan-Euro Call Centers Ahead</B>

By Amon Cohen

After a year's intensive review of its distribution policy, Carlson Wagonlit Travel has announced its intention to service half of its transactions in Europe through call centers by 2002. The global travel agency will create a pan-European network of 15 to 20 travel management centers, as it calls them, with one or two located in each major national market. Each center will employ 125 to 200 reservations staff and initially only will handle calls in the language of the country in which it is located. All will have access to the same data, allowing Carlson Wagonlit to manage demand by switching calls between centers that work in the same language.

Further evidence that 1999 has been the year of the call center in Europe, Rosenbluth International in March opened its Intellicenter in Ireland, handling reservations for a small number of multinational clients in six countries. American Express also has opened two centers each in the United Kingdom, Sweden and France over the past 18 months, with another opening in Germany expected in the next few weeks. Amex is poised to intensify its efforts and will unveil by year-end a detailed strategy to serve multinational clients across borders.

Business travel reservations have long been handled predominantly by telephone, but call centers represent a concentration of more staff in fewer premises, theoretically reducing costs and improving quality control.

Carlson Wagonlit said its travel management center will be a cut above the usual definition of a call center. It hopes to organize staff to retain and encourage individuals' knowledge of specific clients and local markets. However, the move does signify a further split in the role of the old-fashioned travel consultant, who would service not only a client's reservations but all its other requirements.

Travel management center staff will handle reservations while Carlson Wagonlit's evolving network of account managers will advise on strategic purchasing issues. Routing calls through travel management centers will not be mandatory for Carlson Wagonlit clients, who can continue to maintain implants or use local offices.

Carlson Wagonlit has arrived at some striking conclusions about single-client, pan-European travel management centers. Unlike Rosenbluth, it has taken the view that multilingual call centers generally are to be avoided, not only because of the need to pay premium salaries and international calling costs, but because economies of scale are lost if only a limited set of language-speakers can take a particular call.

The agency also believes that the number of employees determines the success of a call center, not the number of clients. "A client would therefore not benefit from an exclusively dedicated TMC unless it generated sufficient business to employ at least 125 staff, ideally in a single-language environment," the Carlson Wagonlit briefing said. "It is psychologically understandable that a client may want exclusivity but generally this would damage cost-efficiency and not improve service."

There are exceptions to whom would profit from a single-client, perhaps even multilingual, travel management center, said Carlson Wagonlit vice president for strategic operations development Christian Gau. "Clients with their own telecommunications networks would not have to pay extra telephone costs," he said. "The other scenario is where a company has problems enforcing policy. A single center can provide better enforcement and regain control over rogue subsidiaries."

Amex also believes a single call center for multinational clients is a viable option, but, like Carlson Wagonlit, each call center should deal in only one language. However, having one pan-European center filled only with English speakers is an even worse option. "Some U.S. multinationals believe English is spoken throughout their company, but when it comes to putting it into practice, it does not work,'' said Amex vice president for European travel operations Pearse Reynolds. "There are a number of technical and regulatory issues to get right when it comes to pan-European call centers, but the biggest issues are cultural ones. A client needs to ask himself how ready he is to work with a smaller number of centers across a region."

BTI has encountered similar psychological issues. The agency has a few clients whose travelers in the Nordic region are all handled from one service center, and it is piloting a pan-European service center with another client. In the United Kingdom, it will consolidate some of its 29 centers but "not dramatically," said Eric Brannan, managing director of BTI U.K. and Nordic. "Out of London, particularly, there are very strong local attachments."

One client insisted on its BTI service remaining in London even though its management fee arrangement means it must pay for the privilege. Yet other U.K. agencies report that clients are perfectly happy to speak to reservations staff in any part of the country.

Gray Dawes Business Travel, a top 10 U.K. agency, has five sales and ticketing offices outside London but all calls from provincial clients are routed to a call center in Colchester, about 50 miles from the capital. There is no loss of quality as a result, said managing director Ray Hopkins.

On the contrary, he added, "there is better control of quality of service. That is the main reason for the arrangement, not saving money. It is not much cheaper having a single call center, rather than several smaller ones, once you are outside London. They would be looking at the same screen wherever they were."

Amex's Reynolds believes the technology is more complicated than that. The main technical obstacle to call centers has been giving agents the ability to call up all the relevant information for the traveler, including the GDS, corporate travel policy, personal preferences and negotiated fares. "The systems have traditionally been very poor at this, but we are finally making some breakthroughs," said Reynolds. If access can be made easy for travelers and transaction costs are reduced, he added, then call centers ultimately will account for the bulk of business travel transactions that require human intervention. "The travel industry is moving inevitably and belatedly towards it," he said. "It is complex but not as complex as people in travel make it out to be.