Profiles In Travel Management: Opening A Pan-European Call Center

Like the pioneering General Electric before it, Eli Lilly and Co. has consolidated its European travel operations through a single center run by Carlson Wagonlit Travel. Unlike GE, Lilly has opted not to use an operations center in low-cost Eastern Europe, instead choosing a location next to London's Heathrow Airport, where employees can handle bookings in five languages instead of the one—English—spoken for GE in Warsaw.

Lilly sees high labor costs justified by a correspondingly higher standard of service and gains better visibility, control of spend and policy compliance from routing bookings from nine countries through Heathrow. Lilly started moving the nine countries—representing 75 percent to 80 percent of its European spend—into Heathrow in December 2005. Since July 2006, average ticket prices each month fell from the previous year.

Lilly also differs from GE in that its travel program was not well-consolidated prior to moving to a single European operations center. The opening of Heathrow is part of a standardization process that includes consolidating with a single travel management company in Europe for the first time and the introduction of an online self-booking tool: GetThere.

Previously, Lilly used Business Travel International in 12 countries, Carlson Wagonlit in eight and miscellaneous agents in another eight. "It was the Wild West of Lilly," said European travel manager Richard Darley. "Several of the local agencies were giving us no data and we had no idea which suppliers we were using. When we wanted to know why our travel spend rocketed in 2004, we couldn't find the answer."

Among countries where information was scant were Turkey and Russia, both of which increased spend significantly. Darley also anticipated better deals with the likes of Star Alliance if he could bring some smaller countries into the fold. "It was an interesting carrot I wanted to dangle before the airlines," he said.

As a result, Lilly went out to tender for its European TMC business in the middle of 2005, chose Carlson Wagonlit in September 2005 and switched countries not already with Carlson Wagonlit in January 2006. From December 2005, countries were switched to Heathrow at the rate of one per fortnight.

Darley concluded that a monolingual operation would not work, as feedback told him that field staff and secretaries in some countries were not proficient enough to book travel in English. "Somewhere like Warsaw, where the labor pool mainly speaks only English, was too risky for us," said Darley. "We decided to pay more for better language skills. Carlson Wagonlit recommended Heathrow because the presence of the airport means there are good language skills in the area."

The five languages spoken at Heathrow are English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. In addition to the five homes to those tongues, Heathrow also handles Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland.

Research indicated it was only worth introducing a language into Heathrow if there were enough bookings in that language to occupy three full-time staff. He agreed to let certain countries stay with Carlson Wagonlit locally if their language did not meet this criterion and they did not wish to speak English either.

For Darley, the major benefit of the single center is visibility. In part, this helps with security concerns. For example, when traces of radioactive polonium-210 were discovered on three British Airways aircraft last November, the Heathrow center was able to identify within two hours a pair of Lilly employees and a customer who had been aboard and contacted all three within a further 60 minutes.

Visibility also allows Darley to standardize and enforce policy, including one that allows travelers to avoid exception reports if they choose a ticketing option up to E150 more expensive than the cheapest short-haul fare offered them, or E750 on long-haul flights. Rules like these are automated in the Heathrow back-office process.

Another policy example is encouraging travelers to book earlier, a strategy for which Darley is operating a Six Sigma project. "It is much easier to get travelers to book earlier through Heathrow because we can deliver a consistent message and implement the strategy immediately," he said. "Before we opened Heathrow, we changed transatlantic policy to economy [coach] class but that took us three months to line up."

The same will apply to the rollout of GetThere. Without any active promotion, adoption of GetThere has reached 30 percent in the European countries where Lilly has made it available. Darley believes Heathrow has given him a solid platform from which he can push adoption of the booking tool aggressively, including a mandate, in 2007.

Darley also is finding that a pan-European operation matches Lilly's changed organizational structure. For example, Lilly's Vienna office recently organized a meeting for doctors from around Europe. Secretaries in the doctors' home countries booked the travel through Heathrow, but the cost was charged to Vienna.

Despite being in a high-cost country, Heathrow nevertheless is proving cheaper overall than using Carlson Wagonlit facilities in each country. However, this is not unanimously the case, and Darley needed to explain to travelers in Spain why their TMC fees were rising.

Lilly excluded some countries from the call center, including Turkey and Russia, because their operational requirements for bookings, such as the use of a global distribution system, are different.

Others were brought in but needed careful nursing to overcome skepticism about working with agents in a different country whom they had never met. "This was especially the case in southern Europe, where relationships are so important," said Darley. Booking through Heathrow also means using a corporate card, which required some countries to ditch paper invoices for the first time. Darley believes this is saving Lilly roughly E30 per transaction.

Unexpected problems also cropped up. One was that Heathrow initially used non-native speakers who sometimes struggled to understand regional accents in countries such as Spain. Only native speakers are employed now. Another problem, familiar to GE, was difficulty in loading some airlines' fares into Sabre, the GDS chosen by Carlson Wagonlit for Heathrow.

Darley learned to manage expectations. "At first, we said the transition would be simple, but then we changed to saying it would be horrible and would take three months to sort out," he said. "Don't tell them it will be fun. Tell them it will be tough, and then you can exceed their expectations."

He also recognized he importance of following up and fixing every complaint, whether it was reservation staff's lack of knowledge about rail product or difficulties with loading the profiles of Spanish travelers. "We didn't want to lose the trust of travelers and bookers," said Darley. "We knew that if we couldn't sort out their grievances in three months, they would want to pull out of Heathrow." That has not happened. Darley added that he has been able to tackle problems quickly thanks to appointing a Carlson Wagonlit account manager and Lilly representative in each country to handle complaints and communicate back to him.

Darley attributed the acceptance of Heathrow to meticulous preparation, included a detailed project plan that anticipated difficulties. "A lot of people in Lilly are watching it," he said. "This is the first time we have consolidated a general service supplier in so many countries."