Polaroid Taps AXI Feature
<B> Polaroid Taps AXI Feature</B>
By Cheryl Rosen
<I>Cambridge, Mass.</I> - After a summer-long pilot of American Express' AXI online booking system, Polaroid Corp. is rolling the product out to 2,000 users--and at the same time looking for an expense reporting product to form a complete end-to-end solution.
For American Express, the $10 million air volume Polaroid account was a pilot not only of AXI, but also of a new mass enrollment feature that allows the agency to quickly issue I.D. numbers and passwords to large numbers of new users.
"We were the first customer to have all our IDs and passwords pre-loaded by American Express," said Polaroid travel manager Steve Berry. "They figured out a way to take the list of American Express cardholders and match it with our internal e-mail addresses, so they could add all the profiles and passwords on Day One. All we had to do was tell travelers their password is their employee number and their logon is their e-mail number, and it worked pretty well."
Polaroid rolled out the system to 2,000 cardholders and 250 secretaries who will serve as travel arrangers. After just "a few seminars" to acquaint employees with AXI and show them how to use it, the company is getting about 20 reservations a month, though its booking ratio hovers at "15 to 20 looks for every booking," Berry said.
Berry has negotiated a lower transaction fee "on the order of about 25 percent lower," for travel reservations made through AXI rather than called in to the agency, but the company is not mandating online booking at this time. "Initially we're leaving the option up to the traveler, and then we'll decide whether to push it," he said. "It's a slow ramp-up."
Indeed, Berry was not even thinking about rolling out a product so quickly when he first approached senior management about trying an online booking product. "I carried the idea to our vice president of purchasing and was fortunate that he's an avid desktop tool user, so once he looked into the idea, he pushed me to do it faster than I had expected," Berry said.
On top of that prompting to speed into implementation, Berry got the rush from the very group that often bottlenecks attempts to roll out travel technology: the internal IS department.
"I wasn't planning to do a travel home page right now, but once our IS people saw what I was doing with AXI, they said, 'Hey, you ought to be doing this on our site,' " he said. "I just happened to be doing something that was interesting to them just at the right time, and they got it up almost overnight."
The Polaroid travel home page now includes information on how to use AXI and an icon that connects to the software, as well as the full company travel policy and cost reduction tips for travelers.
The current rollout of AXI follows two successful pilot tests--one with a group of frequent traveler volunteers and one with corporate office secretaries--in which Berry "didn't learn anything I didn't already know from reading BTN regularly," he said. "The travel arrangers like to print out all the options to show the VPs, and they were getting pretty good information."
Polaroid also is close to a launching an automated expense reporting system, Berry said. While he is involved in that process as well, the project will be managed by the company's treasury department.