Pittsburgh - Corporate travelers upon returning home from a business trip generally are too tired, swamped or put off to fill out surveys and share thoughts with their travel department. Bayer Corp., however, has seen tangible results from its quick and simple post-trip survey that have led to better supplier relations.
First developed in 1999
(BTN, Jan. 10, 2000) and tweaked a few times since, Bayer's Lotus Notes-based Welcome Home survey has shown suppliers which elements of customer service they need to work on in order to retain or expand Bayer's business. Because the survey is as easy to delete from a traveler's e-mail inbox as to submit for tabulation—if the trip was complaint free—the response rate usually tops 60 percent. The company currently fields about 10,000 travelers.
The results of traveler feedback have led Bayer to address and resolve specific issues with its car, airline, hotel and agency partners. "This product helps travel management be seen in a better light from both the supplier side and the customer side," said Paul Lang, Bayer manager of travel services and materials management. The company now is seeking to market the survey to other interested travel departments.
Specifically, and not surprisingly, results show travelers complain most about airlines—cancellations/delays is the biggest complaint area—but travel agents are not immune from criticism. Feedback enabled Bayer to identify such issues as improper electronic ticket issuance and late-arriving ticket receipts. In fact, complaints about the travel agency are what initially prompted Bayer to develop the survey.
"There was no objective, comprehensive way to get our hands around how the agency really was performing," Lang said. "There was too small a return rate on the survey issued by the travel agency."
Bayer's agency, WorldTravel BTI, provides a nightly feed to the travel department that includes traveler name, trip return date, supplier information and a unique identifier.
The system then sends e-mails with the embedded survey to those travelers who just returned. The traveler is asked if the overall travel experience was satisfactory. If the traveler answers yes, the survey is complete and sent back to the travel department for tabulation. If the traveler answers no, he or she is prompted to check off the unsatisfactory element or elements: travel agency, airline, car rental or hotel. If the traveler selects an airline, car or hotel, a pop-up menu with frequently cited problems appears for the traveler to complete. "There is not a lot of room for subjective response," Lang noted. "If a flight is late, it's late. If a bag is lost, it's lost." A final field allows the traveler to elaborate on the travel experience before submitting the survey to the travel department.
After it is collected, data can be sorted by travel date, supplier, division, cost center and individual. It is compiled for 120 days and then archived. Now Bayer has a vast database of customer service performance metrics and can evaluate supplier comparisons in the course of contract negotiations.
"I did not want to put service metrics in the last agency RFP because I did not want an agency to not submit a bid," Lang recalled. "But we were at a certain service level, so why should we have asked for less? We included those metrics in the RFP and it did not have a negative impact on the bidding."
Aside from agency feedback—which is sent to WorldTravel BTI for review—and a growing list of airline complaints, the survey also identified issues on the car rental side.
"We had our secondary provider asking for more marketshare, but we found the primary was getting one complaint per 100 rentals while the secondary was getting one per 58 rentals," Lang explained. "I told them there was no reason for us to give them more business with those metrics and that message was pretty effective."
Furthermore, when performance from the primary car rental supplier began slipping last year, Lang wrote to senior executives at the company and overall performance improved.
More specifically, the survey uncovered a localized problem at a Northeast rental location run by the primary car rental supplier. "It ended up being a personnel problem and the supplier made changes. After that, the complaints subsided," Lang said.
Bayer's primary car rental supplier—which, like WorldTravel BTI, now is held to contractual service levels—receives all related feedback generated by the survey, while hotel complaints are addressed on an as-needed basis. "It is harder to deal with hotels," Lang said, noting the complexities of owner/operator relationships at many properties.
Bayer's travel management department, including senior logistics representative Jack Lever, teamed with the IT department to build the survey, with involvement from the company's WorldTravel BTI account manager.
After this year's National Business Travel Association conference in Salt Lake City, at which Lang presented the survey and received suggestions that Bayer sell it to other interested travel departments, the company obtained a copyright for the product. "We are looking for a partner to get involved in selling it," Lang said.
Bayer's U.S. operations are part of Bayer AG, based in Leverkusen, Germany. In the United States, the company last year had a booked air volume of $47 million and a total T&E spend near $130 million.
Other travel management goals for this year include increasing online booking penetration with TRX ResAssist and revisiting airline supplier strategies.