Accenture in 2011 launched My Travel Summary, a dashboard widget detailing six airfare spending metrics that appears on the personal Accenture portal home page of every traveling employee. Now, following in the success of the initial phase, travelers can see how they stack up against their peers in such fiscal year-to-date metrics as total tickets booked, tickets booked out of policy, total airfare spending, missed air savings, average advance booking period and the amount of carbon emissions produced.
As with some other travel initiatives, providing such information is made possible by close coordination with Carlson Wagonlit Travel, Accenture's consolidated global agency. The key is integrating booked air data fed by CWT with Accenture's internal human resources data.
"We introduced comparators to this dashboard in the past year," said Accenture global travel program manager Lisa Keller, speaking last month on a webinar conducted by The BTN Group. She noted that comparisons can be based on geography, level within the organization and other criteria, and are updated monthly. "You can also compare your personal spend to that of your client team. When we book travel we use a charge number; you have to indicate which account you are charging that flight to. That's what is so critical and has been of so much value to use, to have that booked air data integrated with our HR data and our financial data. It allows for that sort of peer group creation.
"Traveler response has been very positive," Keller continued. "For some people, a motivator for them is to minimize their carbon footprint."
Accenture this week issued its latest corporate citizenship report. It cited My Travel Summary as one method that helped reduce emissions from air travel in fiscal 2013 by 5 percent from fiscal 2012, to 1.33 metric tons per employee. "By providing monthly and year-to-date summaries of their carbon emissions, and encouraging them to use virtual meeting technologies, this tool makes it easier for our people to understand their travel-related carbon impact," according to the report, which noted that 80 percent of the firm's global emissions footprint is generated from "air travel to see clients and from the use of electricity."
Keller explained that CWT aggregates all travel booking data globally and "is able to provide us on day two of the month a consolidated report of all our bookings from the previous month. We load that into an Accenture data mart where it is married with our HR data, and then that produces the dashboard report. The majority of that work was done in-house by Accenture, leveraging monthly data feeds from Carlson."
In another example of applying booked air data, Accenture in February launched the Smart Purchase Program, which sends personalized messages to travelers after they book travel.
"If they are buying a ticket less than seven days in advance and the price of that ticket is more than the average or expected price for Accenture travelers on that route, they receive a polite message from the travel team informing them that they paid more than expected and giving them some suggestions on how to save money on future bookings," Keller said. "For those people buying in advance and paying less than expected or less than average per route, they receive a thank- you message. So we're doing both educational messages and positive recognition to recognize those people exhibiting the best behavior."
Like the My Travel Summary initiative, the Smart Purchase Program is "agency-driven," Keller said. "With Carlson, we have a program messenger function that generates these messages. The approach varies by [geography]. In Europe, where this is live, they're sending messages in real time. In North America they are batched and sent monthly."
Accenture also is using its air travel data for social networking and gamification. Launched last year, the Connected Traveler program helps employees share trip information. When they are on the checkout page at the end of the flight-booking process within the GetThere booking tool used globally by Accenture, they are asked if they are willing to share high-level itinerary information with colleagues. If they do, the information is posted to Accenture Activity Stream—"the equivalent of an internal Facebook," according to Keller. It appears on an employee's personal news stream, as well as those of whoever is "following" that employee within the social network. "That itinerary is shared twice, at the time of booking and then the day before departure date," Keller said. "This was introduced to get more value out of those trips and help make connections, either within the location they are traveling or with those who also may be traveling to the same location."
To make the Connected Traveler program work, CWT sends a daily feed of booked trips for which employees indicated a willingness to share details.
To acknowledge positive behavior, Accenture established Smart Traveler, one of several recognition programs around the company. Travelers earn badges when their bookings in a quarter are on average at least seven days in advance, or when they share trip information via the Connected Traveler program. "Similar to the other programs, this is generated by integrating our booked air data with our HR data to push these badges out to a person's personal page," Keller said.
Next up for Accenture is a companywide expense management initiative led by the finance organization and meant to reduce policy noncompliance. Keller explained that "within the next 12 months we'll be enhancing our expense system, bringing in a daily feed of our booked agency data in our expense system and being able to provide real-time messaging when people are entering expenses, trigger approvals, etc."