Amex Opens Miami Center For E-Booking Fulfillment
<B>Amex Opens Miami Center For E-Booking Fulfillment</B>
By Megan Hjermstad
Responding to corporations' demands for low-cost fulfillment and higher online booking adoption, American Express earlier this month opened a centralized e-fulfillment center in Miami that offers 24-hour service from counselors specially trained on multiple online booking systems and global distribution system platforms and enhanced technology for automated quality control and file finishing.
The new Miami center, which replaces an existing Miami center, currently is fulfilling an average of 2,000 transactions per day for 160 midsize and large customers. The center is implementing 30 customers and has 40 additional customers in the pipeline. The Miami center complements Amex's Phoenix fulfillment center, which supports 900 active companies on its proprietary RezPort product for lightly managed programs.
Amex plans to open a third fulfillment center this summer to meet the increasing demand within its midsize and large market customer base. The center's location has not been determined yet, but will be strategically located in a different weather pattern and different time zone to provide back-up in emergency situations for the Miami and Phoenix centers.
The Miami center employs 62 counselors and is hiring another 30, all of whom are trained to use the Web, multiple booking engines and provide navigation assistance.
The interactive counselor's primary objective is to drive online adoption by coaching people through the self-service reservation process so there is no conflict of interest that agents in a traditional environment might experience.
Stamford, Conn.-based Thomson Corp. since January has been phasing by division into the Miami center to complement its onsite. "All along I've felt having file finishing and support done by the onsite is putting counselors in the place of having competing priorities. If a traveler had questions and was stumbling through the booking process, he was calling the same number, talking to the same person who had done it for him before, and it was putting that person in an awkward position," said Chris Staal, Thomson director of corporate travel. "In the e-fulfillment center, people truly have experience, not just with travel but with the booking product. We are giving travelers access to that expertise."
Newark, N.J.-based Prudential Insurance Co., as it transitioned from AXI to CTO, opted to move fulfillment from an Amex business travel center to the Miami fulfillment center to improve on the 31 percent domestic penetration rate it already had achieved with AXI. "As we started to get a higher penetration, it was starting to become a draw on our resources internally," said Maureen Fairfax, Prudential manager of corporate travel services. "Because the center specializes in fulfillment, including product usage and navigation support, it will increase penetration, which is key."
The center is providing an AXI help desk and the support previously housed in Houston, and counselors are helping clients through the transition to CTO (see story, page 1). The center is organized by online booking products and GDSs. For example, counselors whose primary role is to support customers on Apollo and GetThere are seated together.
Since the Miami center will provide fulfillment for any booking engine, it enables counselors to analyze and assess booking tools and the compatibility of certain booking tools with different GDSs in a single environment. The center is running on Sabre and Apollo, and will bring up Worldspan by the end of this month and Amadeus by the end of May.
Amex estimated that the automation enables an interactive counselor on average to handle nearly four times what a traditional counselor can do.
Amex can write 800 codes for an individual company depending on the complexity of the program. For instance, the interactive team wrote 100 custom quality control steps for the Thomson account. "Their technology enables us to automate policy to the degree that we have, and that absolutely brings down the cost," said Staal.
Said Prudential's Fairfax, "It gives us the ability to take advantage of the latest technology developments on the back end, file finishing and automation that applies unused nonrefundable tickets, which increases the no-touch rate."
The automation cuts anywhere from 12 to 18 minutes out of the process. "We cannot fully automate the exchange process," said James Dargan, Amex director of operations for interactive travel, "because it will always require agent intervention, but we can take time out of the process.