CWT Steers Clients To TSS

<B>CWT Steers Clients To TSS</B>

<I>Ronald Merriman, executive vice president of client services for Carlson Wagonlit Travel, North America, sat down with BTN travel management editor Megan Hjermstad recently to discuss the second largest travel agency's proprietary Traveler Service System and its corporate client relations.</I>

<B>BTN:</B> We've been hearing that the mega agencies don't appear to be bidding on a number of very large accounts. Why wouldn't a mega bid on a significant account?

<B>Ron Merriman:</B> To the extent your premise is true, the reason to bid is that you really think you have a product offering and service delivery that would match a client's expectations. The reason not to bid is you don't feel you have an alignment of expectations and the ability to match that.

We are focused on new business for those clients that we think are the most interested in and committed strategically to having the kind of service configuration that we have built and now are expanding.

I'll give you an example where we would walk away from what might be perceived as an opportunity: We got an invitation to take on a client, a major financial institution, which was very unhappy with one of our competitors that was servicing them. They were unhappy about the mega agency's ability to maintain a workforce, recruit and retain the right people and keep people focused on servicing this customer all in a major metropolitan downtown city location. So we said, "What is it you would expect of us?" And they said, "We would like to see you hire people, and supervise and manage very effectively this same location for us." And I said, "Tell them no thanks."

As painful as it is for me to tell somebody I'm really not interested in their business, if that's what they think they need and if we can't sit down and convince them that there is a better model, then we don't want it. We've tried to run offsite locations as a dedicated center in the same city, with the same problem, with another unhappy client. We're not going to do that anymore, we're not going to perpetuate a problem.

<B>BTN:</B> Are you trying to be all things to all customers?

<B>Merriman:</B> No, absolutely not. That has been a frailty of this whole business. As someone who has not been in the business my whole life, I think that's what has gotten this whole industry in trouble and why this whole industry has a fairly poor reputation for providing service. That's why we will not today respond and bid on businesses that want a configuration like the one I described earlier. We're the other end of the spectrum. My perception of the industry has been very much a custom-shop model, which to me is being all things to all people. We have moved much more in the other direction of being able to harness technology in a network environment, so we can give the client all the things they generally expect of a custom shop, but without having to build the custom configuration.

<B>BTN:</B> How many accounts are using the Traveler Service System so far?

<B>Merriman:</B> We have 28 clients on it today. We have more than $500 million in travel volume in the process of implementation on it that will pretty well take us through the end of the calendar year. We have two very, very substantial clients committed to it, as well as a variety of clients of all different sizes. In the past 60 days, we've had four companies come to us and engage us on the condition that they can come right in. We're pretty excited about it to say the least.

<B>BTN:</B> How many more clients will use TSS soon?

<B>Merriman:</B> We are really looking at what has become an unbelievable demand for our new solution. We have 100 clients that we will move in over the next 12 months. We certainly will continue with that pace over the next two years. But that's not enough. We have a clamoring in our client base and in other opportunities for us to move faster, not slower.

<B>BTN:</B> Are there certain types of clients that you won't support with this platform?

<B>Merriman:</B> Yes, but it does not depend on size. We have a very exciting relationship with a major professional services firm that has a purchasing consortium for its clients. They're offering all their small and middle-size clients our Client Care Network for their travel business. We started effectively about the first of April. As of yesterday, we had 58 of their clients signed up and average spend of those clients is under $1 million per year. We took a lot of heat in the marketplace that we don't care about small clients. That's nonsense, we care a lot about small clients, but we care about being able to serve them in a way that meets their expectations and allows us to stay our course.

<B>BTN:</B> What exactly is the Traveler Service System?

<B>Merriman:</B> It is a total technology platform to support enhancing the travel booking experience. It's a much more customer friendly way of being able to handle client calls and the unique requirements of that traveler. It's much faster, there's much more software in it that personalizes who that traveler is when they call in. Fundamental to the software is an integrated service platform, integrated call centers, which we call our Client Care Network.

Your recent article (BTN, July 10) on the different sorts of technologies out there, was an interesting commentary and an update on where the industry is. It was also a sad commentary on where the industry is in the sense that it was about trying to get to an integrated call center. If Mary's overloaded in location X, and Johnny's sitting there in location Y with nothing to do, you can load calls, float control if you want to use an airline term. But that's 10- to 15-year-old technology. The financial institutions, the retail businesses, have been doing that for a long time. The whole industry is going to integrated call centers, but you've got to link those things up because you can't run individual on- off call centers with all the expectations that a client has. You can't get there with one unconnected call center.

<B>BTN:</B> What makes TSS a better integrated technology solution?

<B>Merriman:</B> The client care network, and TSS, is at least a generation leap from linking up call centers to better float calls. The old models still have an absolute dependence on third parties because you've got to access the cyber fares on a one-off basis, you've got to decide which GDS you're going to use, and you've got to decide in that kind of a model how you go direct connect.

There's no other peer out there because TSS, if you will, is the box that encloses all of those things. It now goes through a central box. If it comes in through that integrated call center box, it comes through seamlessly. There's no debate about whether it was a totally unassisted booking or an assisted booking, it just comes into the system. We can direct traffic to any GDS through it, and as soon as we make our commitment to a direct connect organization, that will come through it too.

The important thing about all that is customers are still looking for somebody who can stand in the middle of all this switching and directing, and flow of data, and cost and calls, and capture it all in one place and say, "Okay, now what did that all tell us?"

<B>BTN:</B> How will corporations benefit from the greater amount of consolidated travel information that TSS offers?

<B>Merriman:</B> By capturing that travel spend information and travel pattern information for the corporation across its entire travel base. That allows us to not only to consolidate data for your employer, but to match that up with travel spend patterns of other clients and, frankly, be able to negotiate with airlines and other suppliers very differently than we do today. I've had that thrown back in my face a dozen times that airlines will never allow you to consolidate travel spend across clients--in other words aggregate it. I don't buy it in a New York minute. I believe today they don't do it because nobody has the ability to aggregate that information in a way that they can go have a serious conversation around it. They can't deliver it. They can't push a button and move traffic around the system to different suppliers the way TSS will allow us to do. I haven't seen a business yet that will turn away from market share if they can make money at it. If we have the opportunity to move market share by a push of the button, and be able to convince a supplier that that is real, I think it could make for a very interesting dynamic in the marketplace.

Suppliers aren't the enemy. Suppliers will be happy, I think, to participate in that kind of an arena. They just don't believe the data that comes out of the systems today and with good reason because it's not very reliable. If you get a system that's reliable and has the integrity in it, they'll very much want to be part of the process.

<B>BTN:</B> Are clients already using the self-booking tool that you've developed?

<B>Merriman:</B> It's relatively new. It started the first of June. That was the next enhancement of TSS. We are not marketing it as a separate, freestanding mobile self-booking tool because we believe its value to our clients is in its integration with the rest of our system.

<B>BTN:</B> What other components are being built into TSS?

<B>Merriman:</B> We're building a meetings management component so we can start helping a client really track and capture data around meetings because that's the insidious cost in travel today. It's not the travel costs that everybody budgets in for the marketing and finance and sales, that all gets captured and looked at. But the amount of meeting activity that goes on today in corporate America that goes uncaptured is a huge, huge amount of money. We're going to be able to help them capture that information. We'll give them a desktop tool to help them plan the meeting and then bring that travel spend in under travel management so the costs get managed and so the policy gets managed so that meetings are held for the right reasons, in the right places at the right times. It's a huge, huge savings opportunity for clients. Our Client Care Network technology gives us the platform to be able to do that. The one system is built to encase, to envelop all these moving carts.

<B>BTN:</B> How do you price the service?

<B>Merriman:</B> This system allows for a very clear definition of which services are included in the basic TSS client care network delivery.

<B>BTN:</B> You identified core services?

<B>Merriman:</B> Yes, and they're very robust. Corporations are not giving up a lot of things they thought they might be giving up. In some respects, it's actually more robust than what they're able to get in a nondedicated, nonintegrated environment. We have tiered pricing, if you want to call it that. We will work with a client essentially on three levels: fully assisted, partially assisted and unassisted. Our goal is for all our clients in this environment to get the blended rate of those three below $20, which is less than half than in many cases what they're paying today.

<B>BTN:</B> What is the current status of the rollout? Are you beginning locally and then rolling it out globally?

<B>Merriman:</B> Like everything else, it has to be rolled out in stages. We're rolling it out in the United States first. Canada and the United Kingdom will be right on the heels of that mid-next year. We're also not rolling it out across the board saying you all have to be on it by a certain date. In fact we have the reverse problem, which is a nice problem to have. The acceptance in the U.S. of it has been such that the requests for it, the people lining up for it, at the moment exceeds our capacity to do it.

<B>BTN:</B> How have you been approaching your clients and demonstrating the value of TSS to them?

<B>Merriman:</B> In the early stages, when it was new and novel, the question was, what does this really mean? It was trying to demonstrate the pros and cons--what do I give up versus what do I get? But if you really look at what clients expect of us--the ability to control transaction processing globally, the ability to produce meaningful, reliable travel spend information globally, the ability to handle travel in very personalized way, the ability to push information down to the traveler--it requires a very different model. When you sit down in front of clients today and take them through all that, they get there on their own.

We've taken a little bit of heat in the marketplace and in the media, but we're staying our course. If there's something that CWT is going to stand for and is committed to, it is a course that our clients have told us is a winner. Being a little bit new to this industry, one of the things this industry is very good at is chasing fires. You go out and do whatever a client says they think they need or want, and pretty soon you've got a custom shop for something that needs to be a very standardized process, travel booking. Handling clients on a personal side is very custom, but the travel processing is very standard. It has to be a very standardized process and that's what TSS lets us do around the globe.

<B>BTN:</B> How is the Client Care Network offering the personal touch corporations are looking for?

<B>Merriman:</B> What the travel counselor has on their desk today is an unbelievably powerful tool that allows them to really focus on the traveler. One of the things you wrote about in your article is screen pop technology. This is screen pop on Viagra. When you give your pin number or your ID, it pops up. It's very, very important. It has a history of your travel, lots of things that are personal about you. We will continue to make that content more robust. We can offer that to every traveler that's in the system. And so we can track what your travel patterns are, what your likes and dislikes are, what kind hotels you prefer, what kind of restaurants you like and don't like. All that kind of stuff can flow right into it. Again, with TSS you can just keep folding into that all these different content components. If you book through the system on an Internet tool, you don't have to talk to anybody but you'll get a personalized service as if you were talking to your own personal dedicated travel agent.

<B>BTN:</B> Will the system be able to support any online booking system?

<B>Merriman:</B> We absolutely will support any and all technologies that conform to the technology standards of the industry. We have no appetite for trying to build interfaces for ones that don't want to be part of the industry standard. We think clients understand the value of an integrated TSS, which has its own self-booking tool. The beauty of the self-booking tools is they work for the traveler. But they leave a big hole in the system in terms of being able to capture all of the back office information in one place, while being able to give you the self-booking freedom and flexibility that you need to have. These things still sit out there as little satellites, and they don't get into the main system so you have all kinds of problems. That passenger record doesn't sit on our system, it sits out there somewhere.

We're going to be able to demonstrate and have already demonstrated to a number of our clients the value of having the totally integrated self-booking tool that we've got.