Managers Must Strike Right Automated/Agent Balance

<B>Managers Must Strike Right Automated/Agent Balance</B>

Despite increasing automation, travel agencies are not going away. Automation is a tool or tools that can save time on some discrete aspects of purchasing and managing travel--no more, no less. Automation cannot manage anything, especially the complex set of inter-related processes involved in corporate travel. Each company has its own culture, personalities and procedures. Each traveler has different preferences and business requirements that change from trip to trip. Every travel manager has to strike the right balance between the travelers' desire for convenience and management's desire to lower costs.

While it cannot manage, automation can reduce the amount of time required to get some information and complete some transactions. Since time is money, if you ignore the capability of automation to save time, then inevitably you will spend more money on the process of booking travel than you should.

Striking that balance, and translating it into organized purchasing behavior is the essence of corporate travel management. Travel management requires staying on top of numerous interactive working relationships designed to reconcile the high level policies of a company and individual travelers, and process that purchasing dynamic through a series of suppliers.

Travel management also requires strict, zero-defect process management. All the negotiated discounts in the world are worthless, if the fundamental process of making reservations, issuing tickets and helping travelers when they need it is flawed. And, because nearly every trip comes with its own morass of unique complexities, it has been necessary to implement this process with the most expensive system process control known--live human beings.

Only humans can adapt to the almost infinite complexity of many travel itineraries, as well as to the many human problems involved in any trip. No machine can make a traveler feel good or patiently explain new policy rationale. No computer software can make suggestions when a traveler flies back to San Jose when they flew out of San Francisco.

Unfortunately, humans are very expensive and have the desire for job satisfaction. It's great that they are capable of performing very complex tasks requiring intuition and creativity, but they aren't happy unless they use those talents.

And let's face it, while much in the travel business is interesting, many tasks are tedious. No one questions that automation is a much preferable way to perform those tasks than using humans to crunch through interminable queues of reservations, laboriously looking up each passenger and seat to move a client from 13B to 7A. Not only would it be extremely dull, but it would significantly increase the cost of each booking.

The trick to using automation in travel management is to use it in situations where it adds real value. This includes tasks that require lots of repetition and not much comprehension. It allows our incredibly flexible and powerful human agents to focus their efforts on tasks where their skills create value commensurate with their cost.

Use automation to free people from drudgery. Keep agents free to help people and solve problems that no computer can touch. Automation tools are getting better, but we must all learn to use them better as well. Some folks still argue that having travelers book any reservations online wastes the traveler's time. Proponents counter, however, that a good online booking system provides the information that travelers need to make good judgments, freeing agents from the burden of basic tasks.

For many simple roundtrip bookings with air, hotel and car, it can be proven that, on average, travelers with a good tool and a good connection can get more information and complete that transaction faster than they do, on average, over the phone. And there is no cost for an agent. For trips with any wrinkles, however, it's still easier and necessary to rely on human agents. The trick is recognizing when and how to involve people.

There is now talk about new online fulfillment centers that promise lower transaction costs by automating the completion and ticketing of online bookings. Ultimately, the key to success for these centers will not be their ability to automate absolutely everything, but to have automation that will tell live agents when and how they need to be involved.

The bottom line is that neither traditionalists who believe that human agents are always better, nor the Web-heads striving to eliminate human interaction from the booking process will win. The winners in this debate will be travel managers and agencies that strike the right balance.

<I>Tom Wilkinson is senior director of business travel solutions for Menlo Park, Calif.-based GetThere Inc., a subsidiary of Sabre.