For buyers dealing with stubborn travelers, driving travel policy
compliance can seem like a test of the creativity of the human mind. What's the
right proportion of incentives, cajoling, threats and punishments? What's the magic
formula to coax each traveler to use preferred suppliers, book through the right
channels or gain appropriate approvals?
But most travelers don't require that level of struggle. Some,
it turns out, don't even need human intervention. Such is the case at EY, the Big
Four auditor and professional services giant formerly known as Ernst & Young,
where the introduction of a bot that crawls through meeting registrations to find
individuals who haven't booked air tickets has shaved around 20 percent on average
spending on those tickets.
According to EY global travel, meetings and events leader Karen
Hutchings, the problem the bot was created to solve was a simple one. For a bot,
that is. It's a time-consuming one for humans.
The company ranked eighth on BTN's 2016 Corporate Travel 100
list of the largest business travel accounts, and EY's employee base continues to
grow rapidly. Given the size of EY's travel and meetings program, such a percentage
translates into significant savings.
To pilot the bot, the EY travel team targeted a set of internal
events. Hutchings said, "People were registering to attend about six weeks
out, but they were only booking their flights around a week before." EY prefers
that such bookings take place at the time of registration to secure the typically
lower airfares available earlier. Previously, the company relied upon EY's India-based
travel support team to contact those attendees and remind them to book their airfares
as soon as possible.
EY's November 2016 introduction of the bot "automated 70
percent of that work we did manually before," Hutchings said. Specifically,
the bot pings International SOS, the travel risk management firm that helps support
duty of care for EY travelers, to look at who has registered to attend an event.
Through ISOS, the bot also looks at travel bookings made by EY employees via one
of the three travel management companies that service EY and that continuously feed
EY flight data in-to the ISOS system.
"The bot gets a list of everybody registered to attend the
event," Hutchings said. "It will then basically tap into International
SOS to see if somebody has booked their flight. If they have, no action. If they
haven't, the bot then sends a chaser email to the individual to say, 'You've registered
to attend this event on this day. However, you don't appear to have booked your
flight. Please book your flight.' Very simple."
In searching for attendees without airfare, the bot also will
find those who did book air but not through proper TMC channels. "We can check
with them about why they booked that way," Hutchings said. "Then we can
put the information back into International SOS, but the driver for us was to get
people to book flights in advance. The average savings is 18 percent to 22 percent
per event in average ticket price reduction."
How EY Travel Got Turned On to Bots
After determining an automated routine could reasonably replace
the manual one, Global Delivery Services' Automation Central spearheaded development
of the bot internally and followed EY-defined best practices in robotic process
automation, or RPA. According to EY's 2016 RPA report, Get Ready for Robots, finding
such processes can be a delicate challenge.
"While RPA can transform the economics and service level
of current manual operations, we have seen as many as 30 to 50 percent of initial
RPA projects fail," EY reported. "This isn't a reflection of the technology;
there are many successful deployments, but there are some common mistakes that will
often prevent an organization from delivering on the promise of RPA."
Among those mistakes, according to EY, is attempting to use bots
to address overly complex problems. "Targeting RPA at a highly complex process
is a common mistake. This results in significant automation costs, when that effort
could have been better spent automating multiple other processes."
Another, according to EY, is attempting to entirely eliminate
the human element from the bot-enabled process, which ends up in a significant automation
effort, additional cost and little additional benefit. While Hutchings' robotics
implementation reduced the amount of human intervention required to support advance
bookings and achieve the consequent savings, this was merely a slice of the work
that the India-based support team had on their plates. That said, every travel manager
knows driving traveler behavior is time-intensive work.
"The bot can take a thousand or a million transactions.
It makes no difference," Hutchings said, adding that the volume efficiency
gained from this single automation alone has freed up valuable time that the support
team can now spend solving higher-level challenges that are too complex for a bot.
"The support team remains invaluable to the travel program, especially at the
rate EY is growing and the number of travelers that we have," Hutchings said.
New Spots for Bots
With the success of the initiative to increase meeting attendees'
advance purchases of airfares, Hutchings and her team are looking for more opportunities
for bots to prove their value. In March, she launched an effort to push hotel bookings
through designated TMCs by using a bot to locate those travelers who booked airfare
through the TMC but did not book their hotels that way.
"The bot is looking at the data and then sending an email
to the individual to ask them how they have booked their hotel or why they have
booked direct," Hutchings said. After the email is sent, Hutchings' team can
follow up directly with the travelers to remind them of the importance of proper
hotel booking for, among other reasons, duty of care.
Just weeks after the rollout of this bot, hotel booking channel
compliance had increased by 5 percent, a figure Hutchings said should improve with
time. "We'll get more results of this later, when people have to book again,"
she said. "They're not going to go direct. They are going to book through the
agency. This is something I think will take us six months to really see the true
benefit of that compliance piece."
Hutchings also is exploring the possibility of deploying bots
around uploading meeting attendee information into EY's Cvent meetings management
tool. The process is a bit more complex than typically handled by a bot, but the
manual data entry required makes it worthwhile to look into it.
Is a Chatbot Next?
EY's travel management team is considering the introduction of
a chatbot to handle simple, frequently asked questions by travelers who contact
EY's travel help line, such as offering TMC contact information. While it's a different
technology from advance bookings and attachment rates, Hutchings said it's all about
productivity and how EY's travel team can best respond to its travelers.
"The idea is that you define the frequently asked questions
that are going to come in," Hutchings said. "If it's a frequently asked
question, then the answer will come back automatically. On the internet, when you're
on a chatbot and it says, 'Please wait a moment. I'm going to find out for you,'
it means they're finding the next person. And we also plan to set up that feature,
too, so we can have our standard questions and then our team will support the questions
that aren't covered."
The introduction of robotic travel management processes
is uncharted territory for Hutchings' team, but the initial success has fascinated
them. "This makes it so interesting for the team," Hutchings said.
"I never thought, four years ago, I'd be talking about robotics, but it's great.
Working with new, innovative solutions like this is another very interesting part
of our roles."