Many travel management systems single out noncompliant behavior with exception reports to the traveler's senior management several months after the fact, but Coca Cola Co. sends monthly scorecards to its travelers to provide them with a quick "batting average" of where they stack up in the company. Speaking here during an Association of Corporate Travel Executives global event, Coca Cola's Peter Pearson said the company's program drives behavioral changes by pinning employees and departments in direct competition with one another.
"What we wanted to do was to move away from negatively associating exception reporting to more positive reinforcement of being able to compete both internally in a department and against each other," explained Pearson, Coke's TravelSmart creative business solutions manager. "Basically, we look at the batting average first and then we start going down to look at individual behaviors."
The "game," developed by Tom Ruesink of Ruesink Consulting Group, places numeric values to travel booking activities, enabling travelers to gain points toward becoming the top travelers within Coke's North American division. Coke honed in on such activities as booking online through the corporate tool; purchasing domestic air tickets at least seven days in advance and international tickets 21 days in advance; attaching a hotel reservation to an air booking; and booking the lowest logical price for air and hotel, Pearson said.
An Excel spreadsheet highlighting the top and bottom 20 travelers is emailed monthly to travelers within a department, incentivizing them to increase their scores. Publishing names of the travelers is at the discretion of each department, but it is practiced, Ruesink affirmed.
"The whole concept is that scoring is a part of our culture, and it's a part of the current generation," Ruesink said. Creating the dashboards in Excel "really made total sense because it is easily distributed, people want to cut and paste. I had to swallow the techie part of me to what is really going to work and drive data."
Travelers are instructed to purchase the "lowest logical fare" from preferred suppliers within the program. The preferred suppliers are only offered to travelers as options to keep it simple. However, ensuring that each supplier receives a certain amount of market share can be challenging, according to Pearson. If most of the market share is shifted to some suppliers over others, Pearson is able to negotiate more attractive deals with infrequently used suppliers to capture travelers instead of worrying about dispersing share.
"We say that the contracts themselves are reflected as the lowest logical airfare to try to keep it simple," said Ruesink. "We are not trying to confuse the travelers to say, 'We want you to take airline X.' We want you to take the fare that the self-booking tool or the agent offers, and then if that airline is starting to miss out on market share that is a discussion that we are having with the carriers as to why that is."
Since its implementation in 2006, use of the self-booking tool by Coke employees jumped 28 percent, preferred hotel bookings grew 16 percent, seven-day advance air bookings climbed 12 percent, the hotel attachment rate increased just shy of 5 percent and booking the lowest logical fare rose about 3 percent.
Pearson discusses the figures with the finance department on a monthly basis, and training is offered for those "remedial" travelers to better educate them on ways to increase their scores.
Coke's travelers know "right away if they need some basic training" once they are given the reports, said Pearson. "We want people to reward the good travelers, and we want people to identify the worst travelers so they go back and give them the training they need."
Coke is "really trying to focus on and be really clear about" what it requires from its travelers and is "trying to help travelers understand that they have to go through a decision-making process" that will essentially drive travel spend down, Pearson said.
"We have great sluggers, home-run hitters and minor-leaguers," said Pearson. "If they're at 20 percent batting average versus our targeted 80 percent, they have some work to do. It's very simple to understand, and it really does create an immediate response from the travelers and an immediate response from management."
Within Coke, senior management is not exempt from the scorecards, Pearson noted. "The executive level is fair game and, in fact, our North America president when he flies commercial, which is quite often, is under the same batting-average constraints as anyone else," said Pearson.
"The thing you are going to find out with executives is that your best friend in driving those batting averages up is their executive assistants," he said. "We really focus on the admins throughout our organization because often our road warriors themselves are not making those reservations. You really want to make sure they are your co-partner and some actually have them in their performance plan because how an administrative assistant makes the booking affects how the traveler shows up on the scorecard."
The purpose of the exercise is to alter traveler behavior, not necessarily to determine hard cost savings. "Its a model, it is not in our ledger. Overall, it is directional," said Pearson. "It is not going to be exact; it is a model that shows trending."
The cost spent to monitor and distribute the scorecards "is minuscule compared to our spend," Pearson assured. "I don't think it is a difficult ROI for anyone to demonstrate against their total spend."
Encouraged by the positive results in North America, Pearson implemented the program in Europe. "We really feel like this has demonstrated value across the organization, and we have taken these same scorecards [for] use in the European Union," said Pearson. However, Coke had to implement different behavioral drivers, like use of rail and fully flexible coach tickets.
"It's important that you not adopt a point of view of the U.S. behaviors as being the only drivers," warned Pearson. "There are different behaviors, which is why it is important to understand that one scorecard does not work for every company--it is not a cookie cutter, and it changes as your program changes. If you are going to other regions, be aware of the regional drivers, as well as the overarching industry drivers."
Despite experiencing improvements in "every single behavior that we track on the scorecard," Pearson still strives for greater excellence from Coke's 5,000 traveling employees.
"We want people to understand that there are people who travel really well, and we give them little bonuses for being great travelers," said Pearson. "Are we driving them as quickly as we want? No. Are these percentages as high as we want them to be? No."
In North America, Coke recently changed its seven-day advance air purchase policy to 14-days and hopes that travelers will follow the lead of those batting at 90 percent.
"Whenever someone says, 'I can't do this,' we show them sales teams that do. The funny thing about this is that people will say, 'We are a client-facing organization.' Well, this other client-facing organization actually does it and they have twice as many flights," Pearson said.