Amex To Boost Service Through Investment, Integration

American Express Business Travel is integrating its online and offline operations as part of a global restructuring that includes investments in telephony and agent technology and training that Amex expects substantially will improve service levels for corporate customers by the end of next year.

Amex will combine its online and offline divisions at the operations, marketing, corporate communications and supplier relations levels, a move formally announced to employees earlier this month as part of a corporate strategy it began to develop last year.

Amex currently operates its online operations, now 30 percent of its volume, out of a center in Miami. Now, it will begin to support online activity at all of its offices. "By globalizing all our operations, our plan is to create common platforms in terms of front-office, mid-office and back-office, so that wherever we are we can support our customers in a consistent manner," said Amex veteran Priyan Fernando, recently named American Express Business Travel chief operating officer. "If we have common platforms, we should also be able to move our work from one location to another, depending on the customer's needs."

While Amex's integration of online and offline operations is significant, Fernando stressed that the global restructuring strategy is more about business transformation than operational integration. "I don't see it as a massive integration like that of Rosenbluth," he said. "It is more a merger at the senior management level, then taking the best practices we have of both disciplines, and introducing it across both the online and traditional spheres."

While Amex will not disclose costs or estimate savings from this corporate overhaul, Fernando said the company will accelerate investment in travel technology and infrastructure to provide a higher level of service to customers by the end of 2005.

"We have been richly blessed by the company and we are investing quite heavily on infrastructure," Fernando said. During the next two years, Amex will make significant investments in telephony, implementing call routing systems and 24-hour voice response technology, already in testing, across its network. The group also will introduce new workforce management tools to assist in call handling and analysis.

"We are also investing in a front end, called Gateway, that would enable us to employ travel counselors and have a front end that is global distribution system agnostic. That would make it much easier for the travel counselors to work on multiple clients on different GDSs," Fernando said. "The whole idea is to make the travel transaction as seamless as possible and, over time, to be able to handle that transaction from anywhere in the world."

Integral to achieving that seamless transaction is increasing corporate agility by strengthening leadership, streamlining decision making and eliminating the bureaucracy many of its travel counselors now face. "We are trying to bring our employees closer to the customer so that we can empower them more to satisfy and exceed the customer's expectation of us," Fernando said.

While Fernando expects customers to see the difference in service by 2005 or 2006, he said that, in the short term, this global business transformation should be largely transparent to customers. "We are not requiring any behavioral changes on the part of our clients," he said. "I would say that for the most part this should be invisible to our clients for the short term and it should be only upside going forward."

The overall strategy, dubbed Playing 2 Win, "really is a strengthening of our internal processes to create added value for our customers. The Playing 2 Win strategy allows us to recognize all opportunities for the globalization of our business, cost reduction and streamlining," said Alicia Klosowski, vice president of global corporate communications.

Fernando said this aggressive strategy will give the company a stronger hold on its leadership position in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. "By bringing our disparate regional groups into a global construct, we would change they way we look at ourselves, the touch and feel of our business," said Fernando. Still, he said, "There is no kind of big-bang conversion here, it's an evolutionary program that's been accelerated."