Sapient Personalizes Travel Experiences For Employees, Clients

There are certain things you expect to find when entering a hotel room: a bed, of course, and the TV, maybe a desk and an alarm clock. But what about your favorite beer, chilled and waiting with some pretzels? Or maybe PowerBars and Gatorade, since you're such a fitness buff?

Tailored welcome amenities like those are one example of how Boston-based marketing and consulting company Sapient is working to personalize experiences for its most frequent business travelers as well as some clients. The initiative is a component of the Client Experience Project, a company endeavor that has coordinated internal departments and preferred travel suppliers to deliver personalized experiences.

Travel suppliers increasingly are emphasizing traveler personalization, but Sapient as an employer also has embraced the concept. While the company has all but mandated its travel program, director of global travel and client experience Michelle De Costa ‎said it also has contemplated, "How do we make this a program that they want to use? How do we personalize this experience?" 

At the same time, senior management during the past year tasked Sapient's global shared services unit, which includes the travel department, to help create "a competitive advantage" for the company when it comes to engaging clients and employees. "We're not there pitching to the client," said De Costa. "We're not doing the client work, but what can we do to contribute?"

What emerged were a number of personal touches to acknowledge road warriors and show appreciation for clients, especially those traveling to Sapient's largest offices.

Back to that cold beer waiting in the hotel room. One Sapient road warrior is a Pabst Blue Ribbon devotee, said De Costa. "The Colonnade is the hotel we use quite a bit in Boston," she said. "We said to them, 'When you send an amenity, he loves Pabst Blue Ribbon and pretzels.' Now, when he checks in, almost every time he has that."

A few iced beers in a hotel room seem simple enough, but execution requires internal and external coordination, particularly with Sapient's so-called Client Concierges. Back to them in a bit.

First, how does Sapient find out what travelers would want waiting for them in a hotel room? "I have the Client Concierge reaching out to people who know others to find out what they like. I don't want to ask people, 'Do you like beer? Do you like wine? What do you like?' But when they get in their room and there's something put in there that they want, like PowerBars or Gatorade, that is meaningful," said De Costa.

In fact, after getting that information, such personal preferences are catalogued in a centralized spreadsheet, to which Sapient "concierges" have access.

The initiative also required coordination with Sapient's preferred travel management company, BCD Travel. De Costa arranged for a special data feed so that local Sapient Client Concierges "get a daily traveler report," she said. "That's how they know who's coming."

In addition to the agency, Sapient also has worked with local preferred hotels, like the Colonnade. "I've really tried to connect my concierge to the hotel to bridge that up," said De Costa. "I get involved as well, but they're the front line and know when someone is coming. They can reach out to our hotel partner."

De Costa said the program not only acknowledges frequent travelers but also reinforces preferred providers. "Once they're treated really well at a hotel, that becomes their hotel," she said.

Sapient also strives to replicate the experience for clients. "When we are brought in the loop that clients are being brought in, we will go to the hotel and have an amenity to the extent that we can find out what they like. If not, we just work with the hotel and say, 'We have a VIP client coming in, can you put something together?' " That comes with a note that "will always say 'from the Client Experience Team' so that they know they're special to Sapient."

Among other tailored traveler touches, Sapient delivers personalized messages to employees visiting Sapient offices away from home. "The first thing we did is develop marketing material, so each office gets the traveler list so they know who is coming," said De Costa. "We have this really cool welcome guide—or a guest guide—that we send out to people traveling to those offices."

The guide includes a personalized welcome and a variety of visitor information, including general office details, suggestions for getting around the city, restaurant recommendations from local Sapient employees and other "fun tips to make it a personalized experience."

The greeting is sent out in an email with the guest guide attached as a PDF, but the company also is beginning to use its own public mapping and information app, called Dropcast, to incorporate relevant visitor information.

De Costa said the company now is furnishing visiting guides to employees, and "next generation will be to roll it out for clients. We're not sending a physical guest guide to clients today. That will be our next step, to reengineer [the guides] with our marketing team to make them less geared toward someone who works for Sapient."

Sapient's Client Experience Project even has changed how the company positions some of its frontline office personnel.

"We took some of our front-desk people in some of our larger, client-facing offices and we started to hire differently for those positions, looking more for people with a hospitality background." They are now known as the Client Experience Concierges, and in many ways function in ways similar to their hotel counterparts.

De Costa relayed the following story about one such concierge: "We had some VIP clients in our New York office, and after the meeting they were asking about getting a taxi to Penn Station," she said. "Our concierge said, 'I can definitely get a car for you, but the time of day it is, you'll want to take the train.' Our concierge went over, bought them train tickets and then walked them over and got them on the train. It was that kind of service, and the clients wrote back afterwards to say this person had such a positive impact."

The concierges also are tasked with ensuring warm welcomes when clients visit and execute onsite meetings. That can include special touches like branded pens and notebooks for meetings, room staging and "whatever it takes to make that meeting a success," De Costa said. Everything from getting flowers to catering and other details are "all on one request and the concierge in that office can bring to action." They even might be sent a photo with attendee names, so the concierge can recognize key clients when they arrive.

De Costa said the Sapient concierge program, along with those personalized hotel welcomes, is active at "our larger client-facing offices like London, Toronto, New York, Boston, Chicago, Atlanta and Miami. That's where we have a higher concentration of travelers and client visits."

Sapient is working on rolling out the program to other locales. "Our next iteration is that we want to see what Client Experience Light looks like," she said.