Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | B | Business Travel News

Taking service into account. (Best Practices).

Article Excerpt
Hanna Murphy, vice president of travel management, Siemens Shared Services, in the past year has improved traveler service through creating pre-trip and prepopulated, posttrip feedback tools and certifying all of its call center agents as experts on Siemens travel policy and suppliers.

Murphy continues to see the travel vendor complaint resolution process and intensive agent education as opportunities to better inform Siemens travelers so they can effectively buy into the program.

"The number-one priority for us is traveler education," she said. "It's not better negotiated airfares or better negotiated hotels. The whole procurement side is secondary to traveler education. If you have a well-educated traveler, your policy compliance is phenomenal."

Murphy envisioned innovative ways for Siemens to improve traveler service as cost efficiently as possible and mobilized internal and external resources to make them happen. Her vision, she said, was "to be accountable for the entire process."

Taking on full responsibility internally for services from travel suppliers represents a further step for companies and corporate travel buyers that have seen the logic in obtaining the ARC Corporate Travel Department accreditation Siemens secured its CTD status in November of 2001, setting the stage for Murphy and her team to redefine internal and external roles.

"We rolled it out in June 2002, and I m so grateful we did it," she said. "I have learned so much For us the number-one issue was transparency in our financials including collecting the commissions directly and having detailed statements from suppliers; second was benefiting from the float, because agencies tend to give you your commissions and rebates three to six months after they have collected them. The third big issue was we wanted to fulfill our own tickets, which brings the transaction cost down tremendously. We don't do it yet; but we are working with ARC to do this, and we will be ready in a couple of months."

Taking responsibility for agent training became a natural progression. "This practice was part of the CTD," she said. Murphy realized that this was something she had to do because of continuous repetitive comments from travelers that the agents didn't seem...