Pieter Rieder
The Transnationalrecently met with American Express EMEA vice president for business development Pieter Rieder. A wide-ranging discussion on multinational travel management is excerpted here.
For multinational companies, does American Express recommend pan-European, multilingual call centers or an intra-regional configuration?
We are moving huge amounts of transactions online, and probably 40 to 50 percent of European transactions are suited to go online. They are point-to-point, straightforward, and repetitive. The other 50 percent would require really good, experienced insight from a professional travel counselor. While the split is roughly 50/50, some companies are 80/20 one way and others are 80/20 the other way. But for the average organization, once you have taken those electronic transactions, what we are finding now is that the pan-European call centers are last-generation. The latest generation is to actually route the call to a local language speaker who really understands both the business needs of that particular customer and the local environment issues--so you can have a very comfortable conversation about a complex journey. What we are doing now is routing the call to the best person instead of moving the people. Historically, you moved Danish nationals, Finnish, Dutch, Italian, etc., into a pan-European call center somewhere and sat them altogether. One, that is not terribly efficient. What happens when you need more Danish speakers than those sitting in that call center? Secondly, hiring people in Europe is expensive and difficult, so you have to make sure you are hiring the best. And hiring the best often means making it comfortable for them to work in your organization.
How is American Express ensuring access to content for multinational clients, even as the European Commission examines potential global distribution system deregulation?
We are in a situation now where the vast majority of content still is in the GDS, in one form or fashion. The key now is to make sure we have access to all the relevant content for a customer. A lot of intra-European travel is done by low-cost carriers, or rail--especially in France and Germany, where it is a big issue. Probably five years ago, we had to make decisions about investments in the technology platform that would be flexible to take on content: direct low-cost carrier, airline Web site, rail and maybe different GDSs, as well, in some markets. So we have built that neutral platform that underpins the ability to access all of the most relevant content for the client. We can build content access by customer. At the end of the day, Brussels will make a decision [on potential GDS deregulation]. I do not know where that decision will go. We should be largely agnostic, so our investment enables us, either way they decide to go, to not be impacted negatively, pretty much in the same way it went in the United States, where we were able to position ourselves pretty well in that environment. Being in control of your destiny, largely irrespective of what is going on outside you, is the view we have taken as much as we possibly can.
We just came from a panel discussion on end-to-end travel management systems, examining how some companies select a single technology provider while others stitch together different components from different vendors. What are the factors driving that choice?
It can be as simple as plug and play, as long as you have a range of products that would specify the technical capabilities to enable you to do that. Customers have different systems around the world. Most of the organizations we deal with have grown up through merger and acquisition and often have different back-office systems in different countries. Because of that, there tends to be different connectivity. You do not want to change your back-office systems just because of the T&E category, so what we have to do is adapt to that and have tools that can plug and play to all those different versions around the world--SAP in one market, Oracle in another market, whatever you have. Different online tools work better in different markets. It is not really practical to just have one unless you are only in three or four countries. And then you have the variation of different expense management systems. The ability to integrate all of those is the key thing, and for us to overlay and collect all of that data and present it back to them.
How can travel managers develop meaningful metrics for senior management?
Probably the bigger issue there is, if you are a travel manager, what are the things that you need to talk about to connect with your board level? What can you discuss that, one, they will be interested in, and two, they will say that they support it and will invest time and energy and resources? There are different stakeholders within every customer--the head of the line of the business, the CFO, the board, travelers and travel bookers. Those different stakeholders have different drivers, but if you take it at the highest possible level, the board, you can mitigate risk--duty of care, corporate social responsibility--and add to shareholder value. You need to know the metrics around that by looking at travel policy and doing your due diligence on that on a global basis. The law in Chile on health and safety almost certainly will be different than the law in Bulgaria. So it is about understanding that, and making sure you really have a robust travel policy that stands up to scrutiny. Secondly, are you adhering to processes? Looking at Sarbanes-Oxley and similar issues in the European Union around processing T&E, is it transparent? Is the information readily available? Can you pass it to auditors effectively? Are you comfortable that it is accurate? And lastly, looking at cost savings. How do you take cost out of the business but understand that travel is a means to an end? In using travel as a tool for your business to be successful, how do you manage that and keep those costs contained? The metrics around that are very different for different organizations. It could be relative savings versus the marketplace using an IATA fare as the baseline, or it could be absolute year on year cost reduction.
You mentioned CSR. What are the latest practices in terms of duty of care?
Organizations are now looking very stringently at their travel policy to mitigate risk. In terms of the best practices that we are seeing … that the organization understand it is something they absolutely must be focused on. Once they have understood that--and are working with legal representatives and working with us--they are tending to now look at travel policies to basically say, "If you are flying x many hours, you may not rent a car until you have had a good night sleep." Or, "If you are renting a car, and driving in a place with which you are not familiar, you must have a global positioning system." Those are the things that organizations now want to do--to be good citizens to their people and to mitigate risk, which again, is very much a C-level discussion. So, what can we do in our T&E policies that demonstrate good citizenship and good corporate governance? It is the hottest topic that we get involved in at the moment, but not surprisingly. Board level people, risk , shareholder value … CSR drops pretty squarely in the middle of all of those. It has become a much more complex category.