Op-Ed: Thwarting Travel Technology Trouble

Corporate travel managers are particularly concerned about five areas when selecting and using technology. Here is advice on how to cope.

•Point-of-sale technologies provided by the agencies (applications, scripts, Web sites, global distribution systems) are either extremely complex or very legacy. Point-of-sale technologies today have to cover both the online booking application as well as the agent desktop solution. As POS solutions become more complex, travel managers need to push vendors to integrate with each other, understand the nuances of a direct connect or Web source, implement consistent rules and biasing in sync with the overall travel program, provide meaningful data that won't impact agent productivity, ensure preferred vendor program support, define the processing of exceptions, etc. The major travel management companies are deploying new proprietary POS solutions (Renaissance, Symphony, Gateway, Selex) that look and sound wonderful. Deploying these systems is harder than it looks and mistakes will be made along the way. Keep a close eye on the process, regularly audit results and require vendors to deliver on their promises.

•Highly sophisticated mid-office robotics, such as Correx, GDSX, Cornerstone and Trondent, have been around for years. As a result, there are thousands of small programs manipulating your reservations in a variety of ways. Many travel managers are not aware of these routines and what they are doing to their reservations. A travel manager should obtain this list, approve any changes and fully understand the value of these routines to the company. In many cases, problems identified down stream are caused by mid-office routines that are redundant or written incorrectly. Audit your routines and understand their value. If they don't have value, require the agency to turn them off.

•Travel data is fraught with complexity. Data consolidation issues, the handling of full and partial refunds, calculations for fare marketshare and average ticket price, cost-per-mile formulas, etc. are subject to interpretation. Travel managers for the most part accept this data at face value and don't fully understand how they are calculated or where the data comes from. Take the time to understand how the numbers are derived and have your agency or data provider explain it. Identify the differences across the systems (travel, card, vendor).

•Having gained experience with a variety of outsourced call centers for both travel and nontravel clients, you quickly realize that there is a huge difference in how call centers are managed and a high dependency upon technology. Outsourced call centers are significantly more motivated to reduce costs and apply automation wherever possible. The best-run centers take full advantage of the applications that provide work force management, call recording and screen capturing, phone metrics reporting, activity-based compensation models, at-home agent programs, integration with e-mail and chat processing, Web-based reporting of key performance indicators and performance against service-level agreements. For the most part, travel management company call centers don't take advantage of the applications available and aren't as efficient as outsourced centers. This is partially due to the nature of the service provided but also to the financial pressures applied to an outsourced relationship. Margins are thinner and there aren't alternative revenue streams to cover inefficiencies. Key performance indicators and service-level agreements are more aggressively negotiated and applied. You should do the same with your TMC.

•Offshoring is typically a great thing and travel management companies should be applauded for their efforts to identify processes that can be moved to a lower-cost model for customers' benefit. The end result is usually a reduction in costs and often an improvement in overall performance is due to a fresh perspective and focus on the operation sent offshore. Agencies that establish expertise and technology to enable managing offshore resources will survive and have a sustainable competitive advantage. Poorly documented or misunderstood processes, as well as poorly architected technical solutions, will result in a spike in errors, a dramatic increase in handle times, a reduction in quality, higher staff turnover rates, etc. The problem is magnified by the increased time to resolve issues due to language, culture and geographic barriers. Moving processes offshore should be a partnership through which the company and TMC benefit from the results and share in the risks and rewards.

Keep a close eye on these areas and make sure you fully understand the risks and rewards. It's in both your and your TMC's best interest to use the technology correctly and run your operation as efficiently as possible.