AUGUST 01, 2005 -- Industry notions of high-touch customer service are shifting as online adoption rates soar and travel management companies work to stay on the leading edge of automation. While traditional agencies continue to invest in developing their technology offerings, and the online-originating travel management companies-Expedia Corporate Travel, Travelocity Business and Orbitz for Business-tout agent-assisted services, all agree that automation and high-touch service no longer are mutually exclusive.
"In the past, high-touch meant a personal relationship with people onsite - a warm, friendly smile, an interpersonal relationship," said Dean Sivley, chief product and marketing officer for Cendant Corporate Travel Solutions, parent company of Orbitz for Business and Travelport. "Today, in an online environment, you can use automation to create a better high-touch user experience. It can feel tailored to the traveler and tailored to their environment. When you know they're traveling into a city, you can automatically, based on preferences, give them an idea of where to stay, where to eat, make reservations for them."
Cendant's Sivley added that Customer Care Alerts - pushing information out to travelers in anticipation of their travel needs-has taken some of the legwork out of high-touch transaction processing. "We can automatically review their itineraries, en route, and notify them if they're going to experience delays or if their flights are canceled," he said. "We can then take the initiative to rebook them on the next logical flight. It's a proactive, high-touch, high-tech way of handling reservations."
Mark Majewski, senior vice president of operations at WorldTravel BTI, said pushing information to travelers in an automated way, rather than pulling it from them, is becoming the standard.
"Let's say you know a particular client likes Chinese food or steak. You can automatically send them restaurant recommendations or reservations in any city they're traveling to," Majewski said. "There's a lot of automation that we're doing that will make the cost go down and a lot of the manual processes go away. You could, potentially, automate the heck out of things and we're trying like heck to take every nickel, dime and penny out of a transaction."
High-touch service and automation come down to the customers' needs and openness to touchless service, Majewski said. "The client still dictates what is premium, not the agency," he said. "Tell us what you're looking for and we'll do it at the best price we can. If you want everything done online, we'll get there for you."
Many buyers are looking to automate as much of their service as possible. "The term 'high-touch' is misused in the agency community," said Terry Sullo, travel and meetings manager at Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai Technologies. "High-touch doesn't mean VIP service for every person. High-touch is giving them what they want, the way they want it. If that means giving it to them at their keyboard, that's what we have to do. It's still high-touch service."
TMCs, said Sullo, are listening to corporate customers and developing tools to meet their needs, including enhancing unused ticket tracking and reuse functionality and automating upgrades and exchanges - functions that previously required an agent's assistance.
"If it actually uses the technology better to improve service, it's still high-touch," Sullo said. "Things like a place online for a traveler to click if they have a question, where they can send an e-mail and actually get an immediate response. We're Internet-reliant and Web-savvy and we don't like talking to people if we don't have to."
Automation, however, has its limitations, said Matt Hulett, the former president of Expedia Corporate Travel who recently was succeeded by Cheryl Rosner, president of InterActive Corp. sister company Hotels.com (BTNonline, July 15). "The big move is from tactical travel management to strategic travel management, more automation on the simple stuff," he said. "Before, high-touch was, to some degree, still just an order-taking, non-strategic experience. Now, with the simple things being automated, agents and consultants have to be more knowledgeable."
ECT recently expanded its offline service to an Arlington, Texas, fulfillment center with consultants focused on high-touch VIP services. The company maintains VIP desks for all of its clients with more than $1 million in travel spend, said Hulett. "We don't get any questions about the technology anymore because everyone assumes we're going to do cool stuff. It's like, 'OK, but what about my CEO?' " he added. "A lot in travel you can automate, but you can't automate really good service."
Striking the delicate balance between high-touch automation and human assistance is becoming increasingly important to buyers eyeing cost savings.
"I'm not a huge believer in touchless. I'm a huge believer in finding the right balance," said Walt Tressler, travel manager for consumer durables and beverage company Brown - Forman. "It's not just about being touchless, it's about having that reservation touched by the right person in the right way. We're working to find out what our most frequent high-touch requests are and you have to involve mid-office QC and file finishing to really automate it. The real value of touch comes in when someone's on the road and they need to change their reservation on the fly."
With the growing importance of en route customer service and mobile connectivity in mind, such agencies as Milford, Mass. -based Atlas Travel are working to leverage Web-based technology to strike that necessary balance. "We recently gave customers the ability to talk directly to their issuing agent by clicking on a link in their electronic invoice," said Atlas chief technology officer Rock Blanco. "You can look at the invoice and itinerary on your Blackberry, click on the 'push to talk' button and it will connect via voice over IP and allow you to actually talk to the agent who handled your transaction and get specific, direct service."
Voice support and voice-over IP, technologies seen as crucial to streamlining customer service processes, are the current focus of many booking and transaction processing providers. "In addition to enhancing the service available online, making the necessary facilities available via voice is going to be equally important," said Thomas DePasquale, president and CEO of online booking and expense management provider Outtask. "That voice will still be a person, but it'll be the right person at the lowest cost. It's a dual strategy: putting more functionality online and getting those transactions that still need to be touched with the right touch most efficiently and at the lowest cost."
DePasquale said automated voice systems that direct callers through a series of questions and keypad responses often can frustrate customers, but the technology can enable quicker and more direct high-touch customer service.
"Once you go through all the steps, it will send you to the appropriate agent," said DePasquale. "There's a way to do this that isn't a disaster. It gets you to the most appropriate, lowest-cost service. With intelligent call routing, we can eliminate the number of times the person who's on the line can't help you and drastically reduce the number of calls you end up having to make."
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