Travel Procurement - November 2015

too, giving them new meaning. If the discovery of a cheaper rate on tripBAM flips an out-of-policy booking over to the company’s agency, Reynolds pointed out, the company’s hotel attachment rate will increase.

All About The Traveler

Now that NetApp’s travel program has reached maturity, director of global travel services Kathy Rust said, “We’re looking at areas that … are more focused on customer satisfaction and responsiveness.” She wants her TMC to come along for the ride, too, and that means evaluating it beyond the terms of the TMC’s standard service-level agreement. The TMC may show her its response time to calls, but she surveys each traveler when he or she returns from a trip and the entire group again annually to find out more, such as how well the agents serviced the travelers. That kind of data can be of particular help to smaller companies, whose spending levels leave them at the mercy of agencies’ standard KPIs and SLAs, said Schnitzer Steel Industries travel program manager Steven Brossard.

Vincent Campana, vice president and general manager of American Express Global Business Travel’s global client group said many companies are concentrating not just on TMCs’ call-response times but also on the quality of those calls. Amex GBT uses call-recognition software so agents know who the caller is, where the traveler is and what that traveler’s company travel policy is as the call begins. It also helps the agent anticipate the need to involve more agents, say, for a rebooking if there’s a known weather disruption where that traveler is located.

Other KPIs that focus on travelers’
interests are emerging, he said, such
as itinerary tracking, communicating
in emergencies and completeness of
traveler profiles, all in the name of duty
of care. And then there’s sustainability,
which is in everyone’s interest. “It’s not
hyped anymore, but more and more are
running those reports,” said Torsten
Kriedt, vice president of innovation
and intelligence for BCD Travel and
its Advito consulting arm, of a rising
demand for carbon reporting.

The focus on traveler satisfaction and travelers’ needs could filter into buyers’ formal evaluations of suppliers. “If we put a service quotient into our pricing model, we might see the tables turn as to who the best carriers are,” said ACT senior manager of corporate travel Jennifer Steinke. “What are the benefits as a traveler? If we start to combine all those things, we might start to see a dynamic new way of managing our programs.”

A Different Kind Of Data

None of this is to say traditional KPIs
are history. Savings, compliance and
supplier efficiency remain relevant,
Campana said. “Standard KPIs, in the
traditional sense, are something we
still see. They’re good for reporting and
driving metrics in the business, and
those KPIs drive dashboards for differ-
ent audiences.”
And yet, the pool of available data is
drifting; companies always have mea-
sured what has already happened, but
soon they will seek data that informs
their future actions. There’s IBM’s Wat-
son technology—a descendant of the
same artificial intelligence that won Jeop-
ardy in 2011—which can process mas-
sive quantities of information and, using
language skills for both input and output,
deliver intuitive (i.e., humanlike) answers.
It’s been used to cull the reams of medical
papers published every month and help
medical professionals make diagnoses.
In travel management, then, perhaps it
could pinpoint the precise optimal lead-
time for purchasing airfare. Like price-
monitoring tools, that could render
advance-purchase KPIs obsolete.

In use in the travel industry already
are BCD’s Decision Source tool, which
pools data and runs algorithms on that
data to understand how, say, changing a
company’s business-class policy would
impact both the financial bottom line
and travelers. “In the past, we had to use
Excel and a lot of error-prone applica-
tions. Now, we can make it prescriptive
and show the areas KPIs can influence,”
Kriedt said.

Omega World Travel’s Omegalytics reporting system uses predictive analytics to prompt changes in buying behavior. And Travel and Transport has developed a tool that aggregates travel data and external information like fuel prices, airline operational data and weather data to set the stage on which travel buyers’ decisions will play.

As KPIs evolve, it’s becoming clear that the very nature of the information travel buyers can track will change. If today’s challenge is corralling existing information to aid decision-making, tomorrow’s potential will be accurately predicting future data.

Tips For Selecting KPIs

• Determine to whom you will be reporting data, and decide what KPIs would be most relevant to each audience. Focus on what you plan to communicate to engage your stakeholder.

• Understand how KPIs contribute to a collective picture, not just what the number looks like solo.

• Design program goals first, and determine KPIs that advance them.

• Bring in a wider range of data than what your suppliers provide. Hotel data, in particular, might give a view of only a small portion of your program.