American Express Business Travel is working to bring Asia/Pacific into its global plan to provide standard processes and service through new service centers, development of profile tools and implementing a quality-of-service scorecard measurement system now used for agents in North America and Europe. Amex also plans to develop solutions within an integrated end-to-end technology service environment, and is projecting a record year in new business sales in 2008, said president of global travel services Charles Petruccelli.
The company is developing new products for next year including expense and data management solutions to further penetrate its "vertical value chain," according to Petruccelli, who would not disclose definitive plans.
"We have a few things that we are working on at the moment. The way we are doing it is that we are testing with a selected number of customers and we are developing and refining it with those customers until it is ready to be launched in the market," Petruccelli told Business Travel News last week at the China Business Travel Forum in Shanghai. "Every time we think about a new solution, we also do it in such a way that it can be deployed globally. For example, when we launched Axis
(BTN, July 23), we made sure Axis was deployed across all markets in the U.S., but also in Europe and Australia. We want to have at least one coming out every quarter."
Meanwhile, the company last month opened a 160-seat service center in India, which joins an existing center in Australia as the next part of developing the travel management company's service center hub configuration in the region. In 2008, the company plans to open a second center in India and a 150-seat center in Singapore, said Andy Aitkenhead, vice president of client management and operations for Japan, Asia/Pacific and Australia.
The establishment of the service center hubs marks the end of American Express' initiative to provide standard service processes globally
(BTN, Sept. 24).Amex also is implementing its quality of service measurement scorecard into the Asia/Pacific service centers. In the Brisbane, Australia, center, American Express applied call-monitoring technology from the card side of the business that provides screen shots of the agent's progress through the reservation system. The monitoring system will roll out to India and Singapore in 2008. "Now we can actively watch what the consultant is doing and validate what the traveler was asking for when they called," Aitkenhead said.
To further support consistency in service, traveler profile tools are being developed for the Indian market, where only 20 percent of Amex's traveler population is completely profiled, according to Aitkenhead. With increased service will come greater costs as Amex projects agent salaries in the region to increase between 6 percent and 12 percent next year.
Vice president and general manager of JAPA Libby Roy said Amex will work with customers to minimize the configuration of services that they want. All organizations are dealing with the same inflation and salary costs, so net-net, we will see price rises in some of our markets."
Petruccelli said Greater China and India, which are top 10 markets for the TMC in terms of managed volume, eventually would move into the top five. Petruccelli said the company plans for "solid double-digit market growth" next year in Greater China.
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