<B>CFS Revs Up Transactions</B>
By Megan Hjermstad
Corporate Fulfillment Services, a division of WorldTravel BTI, has built the infrastructure and automation to provide low-cost fulfillment for the increasing number of corporations that are booking reservations online.
Since it launched last October, CFS has implemented eight large corporate clients, including Cardinal Health, PeopleSoft, Sabre and Sprint, and projected that this year it will process 200,000 transactions through its Kansas City call center.
Fort Worth, Texas-based Sabre Inc. in October began beta testing with CFS and a month later made the full transition to CFS to provide automated ticket fulfillment when a travel counselor isn't necessary.
"We have certainly given CFS an advantage, testing their processes," said Sabre corporate travel manager Michal Stewart. "A couple of years ago, we delivered high volumes." The travel-related company is an anomaly in the industry, with 95 percent of eligible transactions or 5,000 transactions per month coming through Sabre BTS.
CFS also has been able to draw on the technology and expertise of WorldTravel's sister company, Atlanta-based TRX Inc., which has been providing automated online fulfillment on the leisure side for five years and last year fulfilled transactions worth $7 million.
"TRX was one of the key enablers," said CFS general manager Mary Ellen Humphrey. "They were part of the design team and we were able to catapult forward with their lessons learned."
"Their experience in fulfilling online leisure travel was a plus," said Cotton Tarr, director of global travel services for Dublin, Ohio-based Cardinal Health. "It is a different market, but by capitalizing on that they seemed to know more."
Cardinal Health, which has $40 million in air volume, sent out an agency request for proposal last year for a partner that could provide traditional services and online fulfillment.
"We knew there was an opportunity to generate savings if we could automate the process," said Tarr. "We did not even entertain splitting it. Just like any other procurement, we wanted to leverage the entire thing to achieve the best potential savings."
Cardinal Health in April brought on WorldTravel BTI and CFS simultaneously and, as a result of CFS' automation, has reduced its distribution costs by 62 percent. The company, which in August 2000 introduced BTS, in two months achieved 50 percent adoption. Since going with CFS, Cardinal Health has increased adoption to more than 60 percent of total bookings.
Tarr said he anticipates $2.3 million in savings over three years in direct operating costs based on a stair-stepped goal that the company will reach 80 percent adoption by its third year.
With the use of telephone routing technology, CFS is totally invisible to the traveler. Cardinal Health has one 800-number with a prompt for making changes to online booked reservations that forwards the call to Kansas City.
"The nice thing about the transition is if we did not tell travelers we were making an agency transition, they wouldn't have known. The agents in Kansas City answer the phone exactly the way they answer it here," said Tarr.
Stewart, who by using technology implemented CFS without alerting employees to the change, agreed that there was no need to make an announcement. "People would have just gotten confused. They don't need to know their calls are going up to Kansas City," said Stewart.
Sabre is educating travelers on the price differential between phone and e-mail contact via its intranet and on its agency recording.
"I have to keep driving it home that I would really rather they e-mail," said Stewart. "I tell CFS that they are going to live and die by the response times to that e-mail. They have one shot to make it work, otherwise people won't use it."
"In the past, corporate customers struggling with a booking engine at 10 p.m. e-mailed a question and didn't get a response until the next day," said Humphrey. "Quick response is a requirement in this environment."
To help travel managers monitor traveler behavior, CFS is providing detailed information by tracking travelers' e-mails and phone calls. "In the traditional center, you don't have customer relationship management tools to track the number of e-mails, the reason for the e-mail and the response time down to the traveler level," said Humphrey. "Travel managers want to eliminate phone contact, and we are giving them the detail so they can manage the usage."
For CFS and its clients, the larger goal of taking out costs will be realized by reducing the amount of human contact via education and technology. "Ideally, what we shoot for is no human intervention," said Stewart.
The counselor contact ratio in the Kansas City center is 0.6 for every one transaction, versus three for every one transaction in a typical business travel center. CFS now fulfills 90 percent of transactions without human intervention and is striving toward the 98 percent threshold that TRX's B2C fulfillment arm has achieved.
CFS is doing its part to reach that mark by using automation when possible, such as providing canned responses for e-mail queries for passwords. CFS also is using TRX technology to automate ticketing and split ticketing for the corporate market. What is generally a manual process to split ticketing has been automated through a separate module TRX created in EnCorre for CFS. "We did a lot of work to construct an application for the B2B environment," said Humphrey. "TRX labeled the vanilla version, but we have something different.