Increasing adoption of the full suite of its Symphonie products, Carlson Wagonlit Travel finally may be making headway in its efforts to reverse its downward fortunes. Chicago-based consulting giant Accenture became one of more than 50 companies that are using the five-part suite this month, when it agreed to move its behemoth $254 million in U.S. booked air volume onto Symphonie.
Symphonie customers, which represent 30 percent of CWT's U.S. client base, said the integration of online and agent environments, better access to profiles and a higher incidence of touchless bookings are advantages of the suite.
The success of Symphonie is crucial to CWT. The company for the past two years steadily has lost marketshare. In 2001, CWT's U.S. booked air volume fell from $3.9 billion to $2.87 billion, causing the company to slip from second place to forth place in the pantheon of the largest travel agencies. Likewise, CWT in 2001 suffered the largest drop of any of the agencies' estimated share of the Corporate Travel 100, losing a quarter of its share, hanging onto 16 percent of that elite market's U.S. booked air volume.
Industry experts pin CWT's troubles on inconsistent leadership and a weak salesforce, issues the company has attempted to address with the hiring of sales vet Bob Briggs in January as executive vice president of business development for North America, not long after Robin Schleien was named president of North American operations. Briggs has brought in about two dozen new salespeople to bolster the company's anemic business development team, which had withered away to only a small handful of staffers.
While business suffered when it was clear CWT was up for sale in the late 1990s, the agency also has been rather unlucky since earnestly getting back into the game. Andersen and Worldcom are but two of several large CWT clients whose volumes recently all but dried up.
CWT's bid to regain its market muscle depends mostly on its ability to deliver high-quality, low-cost travel management. To this end, the company late in the fall of 2000 unveiled Symphonie, an attempt at a holistic travel management platform operating under a single database and consisting of a suite of fully integrated core services. The all-in-one platform, which is available in its entirety only in the United States and Canada, is comprised of CWT's Portrait profile database, Horizon self booking tool, Harmony integrated call center service, Freedom wireless access and Discovery Web-based reporting tool. About 600 CWT clients currently are using at least one component of Symphonie, but of the 50 clients that have signed on for the entire platform, few actually have rolled out the Freedom wireless service.
Schleien said Symphonie's radical ramp up in demand in the past six months is attributable to wider knowledge of the suite of products and the efforts of Briggs' salesforce. "In the past 18 months, we have completely refocused CWT, and Symphonie is at the core of our efforts," he said. Schleien cited Symphonie's cost-avoidance benefits, saying 46 percent of Symphonie bookings originate online, and 80 percent of those bookings are touchless. He also said clients that implement Symphonie generally are able to reduce their total air spend by 5 percent to 10 percent.
Although Accenture has been a CWT client for 10 years, it just made the decision to move over to Symphonie this summer. Mary Bastrentaz, Accenture director of U.S. business travel, said the decision hinged on the company's desire to deliver incremental savings on its five-year-old direct connect online booking program. "We use our own Via Online booking tool," she explained, "and we are close to 85 percent adoption for U.S.-based domestic bookings, of which 93 percent is at the manager level and below. Because our usage rates are so high, the only way we can take more cost out of the process is by lowering the expense of the booking tool itself."
Behind the scenes, Accenture's Via Online booking tool is run separately from call center operations, although both are supported by CWT. "It has been marketed as one program, and for the most part this has not inconvenienced our travelers. However, our online bookings and our call center bookings have never been synched up completely," Bastrentaz said. "By moving to Symphonie, we are able to integrate the online and agent-assisted pieces. There will be efficiency gains there, not only in reducing the number of agents but in lowering the number of support staffers needed." Moving to Symphonie's Horizon self-booking tool also means that Accenture no longer has to invest in costly upgrades to its own Via Online self-booking tool.
CWT would not comment on a plan to integrate Via Online's GDS bypass capabilities with Symphonie for Accenture and other users. Via Online is a product of Minneapolis-based Navitaire, a subsidiary of Accenture, which has direct links to the internal reservation systems of six major carriers. Accenture said a chief benefit of Via Online's GDS bypass is the ability for travelers to make their own changes online to previously booked itineraries, thereby reducing agent involvement in the booking process.
Symphonie's adopters said CWT has done a good job of making implementation easy. United Technologies Corp. implemented Symphonie between April 1 and May 15 with the help of a team of dedicated Carlson implementation specialists. UTC, which has an annual U.S. booked air volume of $80 million, is using every aspect of Symphonie except for the Freedom wireless component. "Implementation is a key driver for success," said Judith Hughes, global travel manager at Hartford, Conn.-based UTC. "Carlson provided key expertise during our implementation which enabled us to stay within an aggressive timeline."
Ken Von Hessler, purchasing/travel manager at San Jose, Calif-based Ebay, said Symphonie has been a cost-effective choice for his travel program, which spends $1.8 million in annual domestic airfare and $1.5 million internationally. Buying the entire Symphonie package "is a lot cheaper than buying the components separately," he added. Von Hessler also praised the utility of Symphonie's profile management and reporting tools. "The ability to access profiles at any time and the fact that they are updated in real time is key," he said. "The reporting tool Discovery was a major part of why I went with CWT. It has everything I want. I can drill down, export reports and create graphs by employee, by cost center or by vendor. An overview for top execs also is available."
John Guarneri, global travel manager for BP, said Symphonie's Horizon booking tool has cut the energy giant's costs. "We are up to nearly 50 percent online bookings and 85 percent are touchless," he said. "This allowed BP to go from 12 onsite agents to two." BP just transitioned to Symphonie in July and August, and uses the entire platform in the United States and parts of the platform globally.
On a bundled transaction fee-based pricing scheme, Guarneri said CWT charges BP $20 for each online booking, $75 for each domestic agent assisted booking and $100 for each international agent assisted booking.