<B>Bank Ups Booking</B>
<I>First In A Series On online Adoption</I>
By Jay Campbell
<I>Charlotte - </I>At a time when even the most successful corporate online booking vendor still is reporting under 10 percent usage, corporations around the nation are considering chargebacks, incentives and even mandates to increase traveler acceptance. For First Union Corp., however, achieving a 43 percent rate of air tickets booked in TRX Inc.'s ResAssist within five months was simply a matter of customer service.
Indeed, when asked what was the most effective tool she used in achieving significant adoption rates, vice president and corporate travel manager Elaine Triggs answered promptly, "The help desk."
Initially, a group of six First Union travel counselors took on help desk duties to accommodate the companywide rollout in January, and now all 20 counselors are trained to handle customer service on the booking product. They are even equipped to sign in on the user's current record.
Triggs gives more credit to the help desk than, say, a traveler incentive, which produced few new ResAssist user registrations. Triggs would have canceled the incentive had she not promised a monthly drawing.
More influential was a new domestic corporate travel policy implemented in January that "encourages" travelers with Web access to use ResAssist for all bookings originating in the United States if they are made more than 72 hours before departure. Although that policy change immediately increased the number of registrations, the company has yet to put serious teeth into enforcing it. Triggs noted it did nothing to keep travelers coming back once they tried the system.
"Travelers have mixed emotions about this; it's a change," said Triggs. "I have travelers saying the system is slow, or it's not giving me a price, but there isn't one traveler we have not been able to convert."
First Union, the nation's sixth largest bank, has 7,000 frequent travelers and spent $63 million on U.S.-booked air travel in 2000, making it a member of the Corporate Travel 100. The company bought ResAssist back in 1998, but "played" with the tool for more than two years as it dealt with several mergers and other internal issues.
In 1999, First Union brought its travel operations in-house, using ARC plates owned by Westerville, Ohio-based Travel Solutions and Sabre software set up on its terminals. As part of an ongoing companywide initiative, Triggs' department set out to review all of its policies and determined that booking online would be a worthwhile cost-saver. Still, there was no top-down commandment.
"There was no edict to say 'cut travel 35 percent' or anything like that, it just made good business sense," according to Triggs.
As 2000 approached, internal issues delayed the deployment of ResAssist.
"Being a financial institution, we had some real security issues," said Triggs. "It wasn't until October 2000 that we worked out these things. We had a partnership with our IT team that started with our conversion to Sabre in March 1999, and they helped with some technical online booking issues, regarding security, speed and timeouts. We ended up creating a dedicated circuit, which they now are maintaining."
After overcoming these issues, Triggs established a goal of achieving 30 percent usage and eliminating 12 staffers by the end of September. Now, with 40 percent of all trips booked online and 25 of 45 travel counselors gone through attrition or retraining in other positions thanks to technology, Triggs clearly needs to raise the bar on her goals.
ResAssist now processes an average of 4,800 tickets per month, versus 600 by the company's top human agent.
As for transactional savings, Triggs said it would be difficult to improve on First Union's already-low $17 per transaction, but she expects that to reach $15 for 2001. Triggs does not believe the company's airfares will drop 20 percent, a figure cited by others in the industry, but she does expect some airfare savings, based on feedback from some travelers touting their money-saving experiences. Regarding ROI, she said, "Our investment has more than paid for itself."
Going forward, Triggs plans to move beyond the pilot stage for international travel, implement TRX's Profile Sync product that enables travelers to update their global distribution system profiles through ResAssist (though not the other way around), include family profiles for leisure travel, begin enforcing the policy to book with ResAssist and possibly reduce or eliminate the 72-hour booking window.
"We now encourage ResAssist only if they are booking more than 72 hours in advance, because I was concerned that travelers might not get ticketed if they use it on a Friday evening for Monday morning travel," said Triggs. "But we're now evaluating that with some new back-office support tools that automate the ticketing. We'll run that up the flagpole real soon."
She also may begin running traveler names up the flagpole if they refuse to cooperate, though Triggs will not tell agents to refuse service. "We're just starting to track with the back-office software those who are not following the policy," she said. "We will still assist them and we're not refusing help to anyone, but once they are identified, we will then send them an e-mail. Going forward, if we start to see people with 20 e-mails, I'll probably call them to see what the issues may be. We really want to make sure it's working well before we start with compliance issues."
To keep ongoing tabs on traveler satisfaction, First Union implemented an automated survey process in which users rank satisfaction on a scale of one to seven. The survey is sent twice a month to anyone who has made purchases on ResAssist.
Asked whether she would have done anything differently in her rollout, Triggs said that feedback tells her she should have enhanced traveler training before the major rollout. "I don't know how it would have been done, but we could have benefited from something that increases travelers' familiarity with the product, particularly for those who are not as Web-savvy," she said.
"It can be overwhelming and, ultimately, you still need to walk some people through the reservation," Triggs said. "We're not trying to make travel agents out of people."
<I>Part II of BTN's Profiles In Adoption series will be published June 11.