<B>Bayer Betters Data</B>
<I>Going Direct In Satisfaction Surveys</I>
By Sarah Welt
<I>Pittsburgh</I> - While many corporations still rely on travel agency partners to provide traveler satisfaction surveys and reports, Bayer Corp.'s travel and IT teams have developed an objective system that takes the agency out of the equation. The new Lotus Notes survey implemented last September already has provided accurate, objective feedback on not only the agency, but on all of Bayer's preferred suppliers.
The survey was created because there was a "perception among travelers and in some cases senior management that the agency was not doing a good job," said manager of travel services Paul Lang. "People don't go out of their way to compliment, but they do go out of their way to complain. I wanted to get a very objective, valid handle on the performance of the agency."
Management Alternatives president Carol Ann Salcito said, "This is a best practice and I wish more people would do it. It helps the travel manager because he can be proactive. It also can help with suppliers in salvaging relationships."
Buffalo, N.Y.-based Praxair Inc.'s global procurement manager Jack Flood visited Lang a couple of months ago and sampled the new system. He said it's the first of its kind that he has seen, and added, "I was impressed because it took agency and airlines and separated it out, so you could see if you were dealing with an agency problem or air or hotel or car."
The way the system works is that Bayer, at the end of each day, receives a CRS data download from its agency, WorldTravel Partners. That CRS data is converted into an Excel spreadsheet, but the agency is "only involved at the front end. They can't be accused of sanitizing the information," Lang said.
The spreadsheet then is input into the system, so when travelers return from their trip, they have an e-mail awaiting them, welcoming them back by name and detailing the return date of the trip.
The survey tells employees that if the trip was acceptable, they do not have to return it and their non-response automatically will be recorded as a satisfactory trip. The survey also tells travelers to consult with their travel arrangers before completing it if they did not make their own reservations. "As a traveler, I might have had a fine trip, but the arranger might have had all kinds of trouble with the agency, so we want to bring that to their attention," Lang said.
If travelers responded that they did not have a good travel experience, the system won't allow them to submit the survey until they check off at least one of the segment boxes--agency, airline, car rental, hotel or other--with which they had a problem. Travelers also have the option of providing additional comments. Then the traveler submits the form and is finished.
From there, the travel department can see the status of surveys, whether they are awaiting distribution, have been distributed or have been returned. By clicking on a specific date, the travel department is able to see each traveler's name and information, as well as a smiley face or a frown next to the name to indicate the employee's response to a trip. Information also can be broken out by division, location or cost center and the travel team actually can pull up the individual traveler's survey. "Any time you see a name, you can click on it and get the actual comments from the traveler," said Lang.
On a given day in December, Lang said that 15,018 surveys had been distributed and 9,103 had been returned--or 61 percent. As for the 5,915 who didn't respond, Lang said, "Some travelers may not have opened it up and I wanted to validate that number the best that I could, so I asked WTP account executive Jack Lever to make random phone calls. About 90 percent of the people called said they didn't send back a survey because nothing was wrong. So I took 90 percent of 5,915, which is 5,323, and if you add that to the number that did respond, that is what we are calling an adjusted return of 14,426 surveys." Of those returned, 212 were complaints against the agency, "which equates to 1.5 percent."
Of course, it is not enough to simply know that travelers had a bad experience, it is vital to follow up on all complaints. Lang handles all agency and airline complaints; Barbara Blaisdell, supervisor of travel services, handles hotels; and Lever, who is on the WTP payroll but works as part of the Bayer travel team, is responsible for the auto program.
Lever said he gets a newsletter through the system that sends him all the returned dissatisfied surveys. On a weekly basis, he takes the traveler comments verbatim and creates a chart that lists the traveler's name, the date of rental and confirmation number, and e-mails it to the auto suppliers. It is then up to the supplier to contact the traveler.
To ensure that all followups have been completed, "my chart has to come back to me with attached letters to each of my travelers," said Lever. "I also give my travelers the heads up when I put together this chart and e-mail them to apologize for any inconvenience with a particular supplier." While the survey was designed specifically to monitor agency performance, Lang noted that at the time of the interview in December, "the airlines got 42 percent of the complaints."
One planned development is to further break out the airline category in the survey, dividing it by seat assignments, cancellations and delays, and customer service. Currently, if the traveler clicks the airline box, the system automatically populates the survey with the appropriate airline code. The purpose is to break it down by airline, so "if one particular airline is having more customer service issues than others I will bring it to their attention," Lang said.
There are, however, some glitches in the system that still have to be worked out. For example, survey forms are sent out even if trips are canceled because the agency feed at the time the survey is sent has no way of knowing about trips canceled later. Therefore, the traveler has the option to notify the travel department via the survey. "Then, we just back that out of the numbers, take it out of the total sent and total returned," said Lang. Getting this corrected would take more work on the part of the agency and "it's probably easier to pick up a calculator and back those numbers out."
Prior to the rollout of the Lotus Notes application, traveler satisfaction was measured by the agency through phone interviews, written surveys and reply cards in ticket jackets. "Although I never heard it, in the back of my mind it was always there, that the surveys were subject to criticism because they were all done by the agency, and therefore the data can be sanitized," Lang said. "It doesn't have the same credibility."
While the system currently is not for sale, Lang said he is not one to be protective and because he has received help from other travel managers he is interested in sharing knowledge. "I showed it to about a dozen travel managers and they were all impressed."
Meanwhile, Bob Lichtman, former global travel manager at 3Com and current consultant with The Corporate Solutions Group, said that 3Com began doing traveler surveys in Lotus Notes back in May of 1998. 3Com sent them to travelers and broke the annual survey out by region and job type, using a statistician to write the questions and tabulate results. He said it is important to hire a statistician as well as not to "bombard" frequent travelers with surveys, because "they may get 20 surveys a year. I don't believe in using surveys too frequently." Additionally, Lichtman said a survey should ask not only how the trip was, but how it could be improved.