Concur's new president, appointed Nov. 1, spoke with BTN's Amon Cohen about:
- TripLink
- Concur's customer service
-
Concur's performance under SAP
BTN: Do you plan to do anything different now that you have the power at
Concur?
Eberhard: There are no significant detours required for this company to be
successful. It's much more a doubling down in the areas that have made us
successful before.
BTN: Are you feeling the competition more than Concur did a couple years
ago?
Eberhard: When SAP acquired Concur and retired its own product in this space
and when IBM retired its product and partnered with Concur for its customers to
come across, that left a bit of a vacuum. That vacuum has helped to bring up
the competition, not just in North America but in markets around the world,
which is good and healthy. The last thing you want is to be alone in the market
and responsible for being as loud a voice as possible.
BTN: Where do you feel you are with TripLink? People outside Concur
understand the concept but feel that it's always something for the future
rather than the present.
Eberhard: TripLink is an evolution. The change happening in the marketplace
is an evolution. GBTA did research which found that 38 percent of travelers who
had access to an online booking tool had also booked direct in the last 12
months. I don't think anybody knows where the amount of direct bookings is
going to go in the future, but it is probably going to be a component for a
very long time. Travel managers need some flexibility to capture bookings
wherever they are made. There are 7,000 TripLink customers today.
BTN: A perennial criticism that follows Concur around is about customer
service. Is that something you are going to address, or is that now old news?
Eberhard: One of our proudest achievements of the past 24 months has been the
focus on customer service. We have dramatically increased our customer
satisfaction. We have every person in the company focusing on "customer
first." We have improved our reliability in the technology stack. We have
improved our processes around support, our processes and our services around
implementation and our client management solutions.
BTN: There was little detail about Concur in the most recent SAP earnings
results. Can you update us on the last quarter?
Eberhard: We don't break out our earnings beyond what is
made publicly aware. The end of this year will mark the first two years of the
Concur and SAP relationship, and this has the potential to stand as one of the
best-performing acquisitions SAP has made in the cloud space in terms of
revenue growth.