American Express Makes Strides In Altering Culture

Since becoming American Express Business Travel's COO in the fall of 2004, Priyan Fernando has embarked on a journey to change the company's culture and started by putting in place a standard global infrastructure, standard processes and standard measurements. While Fernando, previously CFO, describes himself as being far along on that first leg of this journey, he told Business Travel News earlier this month that he is not there yet.

So far, he has managed to complete the installation of more than 100 advanced call centers around the world, improve telephony and 24-hour and emergency services, increase the training budget, roll out the TRX Correx mid-office tool globally, deploy a new common front-end system in the United States completely with Sabre and soon with Galileo, advance the consistency of service processes globally, implement standard metrics and score the highest measure ever of employee satisfaction.

He said the journey began two years ago, following the completion of the Rosenbluth integration, with an assessment of how Amex could use its strengths to gain decisive advantages. "That was really the impetus to the investment that we made," said Fernando, who noted that while the company has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the past two years, "The corporation is pretty rigorous about its investment allocations, so we have to account for the benefits."

He said, "standardization, which creates the ability to repeat without variation, has given us a huge amount of cost efficiencies," which he said would recoup the initial investment. Meanwhile, he said it was significant that, "at a time when the industry has been going through some challenges, we have been investing heavily internally."

The advanced call centers employ common technology and are networked together using a virtual private network so that work can be moved from one center to another, depending upon fluctuating demand, agent attrition, emergency conditions or follow-the-sun service requirements.

"These centers of excellence are very much alike. What's beautiful is that because we have invested in common technology, we have the ability to move work," Fernando said. "In this day of avian flu and contingency plans, that becomes a tremendous asset. The commonality allows us to take our capacity to the next level. Because we have good metrics, we can compare one center to the other. We expect our volumes to increase but not our centers. There is room to expand them."

Fernando said Amex designed the Gateway front-end system to be user-friendly, so it can hire customer service people and train them to be travel counselors without them needing to know GDS script. Amex plans to deploy Gateway globally, but will complete the U.S. deployment first.

Fernando said he is making serious progress and has a clear vision of where he is going. "We have the infrastructure in place and the measurements in place and we are seeing great traction," he said, "My number-one priority is to get my customer satisfaction to the point where it becomes the benchmark of the industry. I want people to start talking about us when they talk about customer satisfaction. It has to be synonymous with the brand."