Consultants and other observers five years ago began calling
on the business travel community to adopt social media, and the phenomenon
today is equipping travel managers to reinvent themselves and redraft the rules
of behavior modification.
Once generally described as 'user-generated content,' social
networking or social media for corporate travel programs today encompasses
blogs, online communities, instant messaging networks, trip sharing, ratings
and surveys. The travel management profession's New Communicators are travel
buyers who are toppling the ivory tower with a get-with-the-people approach to
dialogue that eventually could be the only one that works. You're very 1990s if
you think up-and-coming generations of travelers, well equipped to ignore you,
will read travel policies because they are on the intranet rather than printed
on paper.
Instead, better ratings and surveys are providing travel
managers the information they need to improve vendor performance. Internal
community and blog pages allow buyers to, gently or otherwise, guide travelers
to corporate-preferred options, and trip sharing is letting road warriors make
their daily travel battles more cost-effective and possibly more productive.
Taking on social media has helped buyers with duty of care, compliance to
policy, negotiations, traveler service, business efficiency and personal
company visibility.
'For us it became a collaboration tool for the entire
company, built on a small idea from travel,' said Sapient global travel manager
Michelle DeCosta this month during the Business Travel Media Group Tech Talk
2011 conference in Chicago. 'It became so big that we have just completed a
social and business collaboration tool RFP, and we have gone from a free
enterprise-wide solution with Yammer to Jive Software, which gives us more
robust collaboration. I'm excited that in an IT and business consulting
company, travel had this idea that went gangbusters through the organization,
and we have been credited with that.'
Harman International Industries director of global corporate
travel Sally Abella said, 'It's really important for you to find these apps and
put them out there for your travelers because you're the subject-matter expert
about corporate travel. Keep fresh and stay young; you have a lot of young
employees coming into the company. We post apps that we think are of benefit to
the corporate traveler; things that will help them get through business travel
processes easier.'
Business Travel Efficiency
& Service
Improving the experience for end users, as well as for
travel program managers, is a key benefit of updated communications programs.
Pharmaceutical firm Genentech in late 2010 informed United Airlines of problems
its employees were experiencing at San Francisco International Airport that
surfaced in results of a new ratings system and survey of top travelers.
'The results were pretty negative,' said Genentech corporate
travel and small meetings manager Steve Sitto in an interview last month. 'A
lot of our travelers are top flyers with United. We had an inconsistency in
customer service in the check-in and premium lobbies. We met with the station
manager and his direct reports and shared the feedback. There were even tears
in the room. They're such good agents and take it to heart when they find out a
big customer is really not happy. The airport and United have taken several
positive steps forward to try to fix what was happening, and they've done a
really good job. We all make mistakes, but it's how you recover from them, and
with the amount of data they're seeing from us, they've been able to recover
quickly.
'People care about what seat they're sitting in, what hotel
room they're laying their head in and what steering wheel they're sitting
behind,' Sitto said. 'I want to make sure we have as many options as possible
to get the right kind of feedback and data. I don't ever sugarcoat anything. We
tell [suppliers] the good and the bad. If it's not for customers like us who
support them heavily and give them feedback—good and bad—then they're not going
to be able to improve. The thing that kills me the most is when I submit a
complaint on behalf of a traveler, and the minute you complain [suppliers]
throw 5,000 or 10,000 miles in your account or send you a voucher. It makes me
believe that they're actually not listening, and that's why I developed these
surveys. Instead of giving them individual feedback, I give them group feedback
so they have nothing to do with it except take it back and improve upon it,
without feeling like they have to compensate anybody.'
Traveler feedback supports more tactical customer service
situations as well, with tips on the best restaurants near a given client
office, the preferred property in a given city, or even 'I'm working on ABC
Project. What budget are we supposed to be in?' noted Deltek director of global
travel procurement Karoline Mayr.
Sapient's Yammer installation has produced more critical
information: 'Someone sent a message one time that the kiosks were down for a
certain airline at a certain airport,' said DeCosta. 'Lots of responses flooded
in. People were thrilled that they knew to print the boarding card before they
went there, so they didn't have to wait in a humongous line with this carrier.
Having it on the smartphone is the next iteration.'
Deltek's Mayr said that complaints are rare, but when they
do happen, social media shines. She takes to her Microsoft Sharepoint blog to
respond to concerns and inform travelers of the outcome. 'We had someone
complain about a car rental incident in an airport with one vendor,' said Mayr.
'We always immediately answer, and then another had a similar complaint, then
another. [The vendor] ended up firing the person [responsible]. We pasted that
message and let everyone know when our preferred supplier took care of things.'
'My travelers are my greatest champions of the program,'
said DeCosta. 'If they mention a hotel they love and someone else reads it, it
puts more visibility into our preferred suppliers and our programs, and what's
working, and also into who I am. I'm not in India. I'm not in Russia. Now they
realize someone's running the travel program and who that person is, and they
can reach out to us directly.'
Enhanced communication is not just helping travelers.
Rockwell Automation travel strategic sourcing manager Stephen Mitleider said
his firm installed the social and community functions of IBM's Lotus software
to 'open constructive and interactive lines of communication between strategic
sourcing, security, the folks in our company who manage the [expense management]
operation, and with our travelers and travel arrangers. I wanted it to be
interactive in way that a posting on a corporate intranet site could not be.'
At Harman, internal trip sharing via TripIt Groups allows
department heads to see on a map where their employees are and corporate
travelers to identify potentially useful meet-ups. 'I was in London and found
out the sales group was having a meeting there,' said Abella. 'I called and got
a few minutes with them to talk about the travel program.'
Compliance &
Spending
Many social media tools are free, so the return on
investment tends not to be quantified. In addition to the aforementioned
service advantages, though, corporations have benefitted financially from
improved communications tools.
Thanks partly to Sitto's prodding on Genentech's's
enterprise social network, key performance indicators in January and February
were 'tremendous' even at a time of increased industry prices, he said. Sitto
has implemented a 'heavy communications campaign' about online booking tool
use, buying airline tickets in advance, reusing nonrefundable credits and other
best practices.
'We've seen a significant shift in advance-purchase behavior
and supplier-preference behavior, and it's all equaled out to a lower average
ticket price, more efficient transactions and our call volumes are stabilizing,'
he said. 'When you see the numbers in front of you, you know the program is
working and your work from the past 18 months is paying off and behavior is
beginning to change.' Year over year in the January-February timeframe, cost
per mile fell 7 percent, the number of domestic tickets issued outside of 14
days grew by 18 percent and the number of international tickets issued outside
of 14 days rose 40 percent, Sitto said. 'Our international savings because of
advance-purchase behavior has increased 24 percent,' he added. 'People are no
longer buying the highest fares, and that's where we're seeing the savings. It
could be a few thousand dollars more if you're buying last-minute.'
For Deltek, funneling travelers to the right hotel near a
new client site has always been a challenge. 'Our hotel program is constantly
changing,' said Mayr. 'When new projects come ... we contract with the hotel
and put it [on the blog], so they know. They didn't know what they didn't know.
I don't do mass emails at all.'
Buyers empowered this way not only try to move travelers to
preferred suppliers, but also bring preferred suppliers to travelers.
Referencing a discussion at the Travel Tech 2011 conference, DeCosta
illustrated how she became a marketer for a key vendor: 'This morning, Avis was
talking about an app linking to roadside assistance. I immediately got on
[Yammer] and pushed it out there—and I've had four responses already of people
who downloaded it and loved it. For them, it's useful. For me, I'm just
reminding them that when you're booking cars, you're booking Avis.'
'Recently we announced a preferred relationship with United
Airlines and the Star Alliance,' said Rockwell's Mitleider. 'I posted a notice
on how travelers can apply for status match and membership for Mileage Plus.'
Taken to another level, social media helps give travelers 'a
voice in future supplier selection, in the program and in policy development,'
said Mitleider. 'We were about to bring our global hotel program to the market.
Surely, all companies in preparing to do that go through the formal spend
analysis. They will take agency data, card data, spend data and expense report
data, and they will objectively quantify in what cities [and] at what
properties, and project out how many room nights and how much their spend is.
That sort of objective analysis is very typical of how a sourcing process
starts around a hotel program. From that list, and from that analysis, we
actually posted the solicitation list in the [forum] and asked people to go
look at it and validate the list. 'Are these the hotels that you wish to stay
at? If they aren't and you want us to eliminate some, tell us which ones and
give us a little mini-business case for why we should do that. And [tell us] if
there are hotels that we should add.' So we've gone to the people who clearly
have the best local market knowledge.
'We may eliminate some incumbents or we may add some new
properties,' Mitleider continued. 'An incumbent might ask, 'Why did you
eliminate us this year?' and we can say because we got feedback from our
colleagues who advised us that the hotel is under construction, or they are
under new management, or they are reporting some unhappy customer experiences.
The best way to drive compliance is by including your customers in the purchase
decision from the outset.'
A similar experience also led Rockwell to change its key
airlines after a recent sourcing project.
Duty Of Care
Health and safety for travelers is, of course, in both
employees' and corporations' interests.
'It's a wiki, a blog, a discussion board ... a lot of
things,' said Sitto. 'I used to send out mass emails to people, communicating,
for example, an air traffic control strike in Europe or a quake in Asia, and I
would get several hundred out-of-office emails back, which was frustrating.
Most blast emails don't work very well. Most people don't read them. With this,
they can forward the message, set preferences and subscribe to notifications.' As
events unfolded following the recent earthquakes in Japan, Sitto posted
government warnings and a Q&A on radiation, including air-quality updates
and advice on where the Japanese government stocks iodine.
Sapient's social network provides DeCosta an opportunity to
nip noncompliance before it occurs. 'A lot of times they may be booking a
client rate or something outside [the program and that] goes against our duty
of care and risk management' policies, she said. 'I'm able to find out about
that a lot of times because I'll see a new project come up, I'll figure out who's
heading that project, and behind the scenes I can reach out to them to
determine if there is a hotel that I can convert and have it loaded as a
Sapient rate.'
Mass emails are out.
At Rockwell, stakeholders receive targeted email alerts 'indicating
that there is a piece of headline news or actions that have been posted: 'Go
into the team room.' Whether my motivation is to inform, educate, motivate or
influence a purchase decision, or provide to them critical information about
what to do in the event of an emergency, before this I realized that I had no
way to reach out in anything approaching real time.'
—With reporting by
Michael B. Baker and Lauren Darson