December 2022 opened a maelstrom of opportunity and chaos to
managed business travel, and it didn’t come from a single vector. Two major
incidents collided that month. One was very industry specific: an announcement
from American Airlines on December 5 that it would remove content from EDIFACT
and only display it via New Distribution Capability enabled channels. The other
was much broader: Just five days earlier OpenAI rolled out an interface it
called ChatGPT that opened up the world of generative artificial intelligence
to the collective imagination.
The confluence of those events couldn’t have been more
electric for corporate travel—and it’s hard to imagine a scenario that could
have been more disruptive from a technology perspective. Pile on top of that a
managed travel environment that was still emerging from the pit of the
pandemic, with travel management companies trying to staff up and train new
agents and account managers, while travel managers (and business travelers!)
stewed about their TMC’s lack of responsiveness as business travel continued to
ramp up.
That was the picture in December 2022, when Steve Sitto
joined up with Gilead Sciences to rebuild the life sciences company’s global
travel program.
“It was kind of overwhelming—the number of technologies
getting pitched and the marketing claims around them all, especially around AI
and automation,” Sitto told BTN about the industry environment when he took up
the travel management charge at Gilead. “I really had to push back on a lot of
that and figure out what was sustainable for the Gilead culture. What I knew,
above all, was that I wanted to ensure that whatever technologies we adopted
they were used to serve traveler centricity—and not for the sake of innovating
with AI, or whatever.”
Those words are the result of some hard lessons learned by
Sitto, who strives to be a forward thinker and to bring new capabilities to programs
he has managed. Those have included some big names like GE, Roche, Genentech
and Tesla. At one point, Sitto had been a behind-the-scenes innovation partner
for Pana, one of business travel’s first machine learning-oriented travel
tools. After he helped the platform pivot to serve non-profiled travelers and
integrated it into his program, the startup was acquired by Coupa and snatched
from his program. After a similar foray with the highly regarded, new entrant
booking tool PSNGR1, the startup platform unceremoniously shuttered before
Sitto could launch with it.
Maybe Sitto decided to play it safe this time. Or, maybe in
an environment where vaporware and buzzwords had potential to gain momentum
with undeliverable promises, Sitto played it smart.
Globalizing at Gilead
To rebuild the Gilead program, Sitto went all-in with legacy
providers.
He placed the global program with BCD Travel and reconfigured
the existing Concur booking tool. He implemented 11 new instances of Concur, doubling
the existing instances to better serve Gilead’s 43 global markets. The team supplemented
with local solutions in Japan and China, and with the BCD Travel app in a selection
of global markets where Concur did not serve well or the markets were too small
to get onto that tool.
Sitto also reconfigured call center service with major hubs in
the U.S. and the U.K. as well as more localized hubs in Europe and in key
global markets. The final markets in Latam rolled out in February 2024.
Gilead associate director of procurement business strategy and
operations Beth McGlaughlin said the effort had already started when she came
onto the scene.
“I immediately jumped in and started supporting a lot of
listening sessions. We wanted to know what was working in EMEA, what was
working for APAC and what was not.”
From the beginning, the Gilead team focused on traveler segmentation
and who would need to use the program, from executive assistants to road
warriors to infrequent travelers. As a life sciences company, Gilead was very
aware of non-profiled guest travelers like Health Care Providers and event
speakers, who must be handled carefully and in compliance with regulators.
“It was a pretty heavy lift,” said Sitto, “and we did it
pretty fast.” From listening to sourcing to full implementation, it took about a year.
Still, globalizing a program is decidedly table stakes in
terms of functioning as cohesive, equitable program. It’s what happened along
the way that is having a ripple effect outside the Gilead program.
Personalization & Policy Compliance
Traveler segmentation was a
critical starting point for Steve Sitto as he constructed the vision for Gilead’s
reconfigured travel program. It started with a listening tour, graduated into connected
traveler profiles, and is continuing into customized and personalized messaging
that he has created for Gilead’s BCD Travel app.
“The travel app reads profiles to
determine what type of travelers we are dealing with and then messaging is
customized based on their need,” said BCD Travel’s Brenda Catanesi. “Steve
worked very hard on that messaging to ensure the traveler gets a more
personalized experience. Travelers who don’t have a Gilead corporate card get different
messaging than those who do. And they may have slightly different policies
based on the destination in the itinerary—like, for instance, whether to get
insurance with a car rental—so it can be very specific to the person and to the
situation. It’s very contextual.”
Sitto is clear that the app
messaging is not operating with artificial intelligence, he still wants the experience
to feel personal. “It’s really RPA right now, but it is scraping those profiles
to ‘understand’ the traveler, and that is also the foundation we will need to
apply AI when it’s ready.”
Sitto is working internally on a
policy chatbot built on Microsoft Teams. Again, it will be programmatic in the beginning,
but he sees a role for generative AI, particularly when it comes to loyalty
programs. He already partners with United and Delta to deliver loyalty prompts
in the booking workflow, if the user books either airline but does not have a
loyalty number in their profile, the system will ping them to sign up.
“It’s actually amazing how many
people don’t have that—even if they fly 20 times,” said Sitto. “I think it’s
important that they understand the opportunity and make the decision for
themselves. But I also want to automate that because I think it’s a big enough
problem that it impacts the traveler.”
In the near future, he sees the
Gilead internal chatbot playing a role in connecting the loyalty dots to the
core program. “Why couldn’t we connect the chatbot to key supplier websites to
return loyalty information to the traveler?” he said.
Tackling the Most Urgent Issue—Nope, Not NDC
A February 2023 BTN survey called “TMC Reboot” found that
nearly 58 percent of travel managers said call center technologies remained the
most vital area in which TMCs needed to invest. Yes, you read that right—not NDC,
despite the fact the industry was ablaze with agita over it. Clearly TMCs needed
to divert resources to NDC booking and servicing channels, and that pressure
would only build.
At the same time, however, there were more fundamental
issues still lingering on the agency front. Not even one-third of travel
managers surveyed by BTN were feeling sufficiently supported by their TMCs. Agencies
were missing on service KPIs and travel manager feedback gathered by BTN was
peppered with words like “frustrating” and “agents need more training” and “need
to improve professionalism.”
Agencies were painfully aware of it all. More than half of
agencies responding to BTN’s survey said call center tech had received
intensive investment over the previous 12 months. Moreover, 45 percent said
those investments would continue as a top priority over the next 12 months.
* * *
BCD Travel was one of those TMCs investing in what it called
a “Call Center Modernization Project.” Like a number of agencies, BCD Travel had
been working with machine learning and artificial intelligence strategies before
ChatGPT brought generative AI into the public consciousness. It had been
feeding algorithms and tightening processes behind the scenes and it was ready
to take the next step with rolling out AI-powered telephony and email systems
that not only would connect users to an agent quickly—within the second required
by the customer contract, naturally—but also would connect them to the most
recent agent who touched the reservation and equip that agent with the profile,
the itinerary and the latest action taken on that itinerary so they can
anticipate the caller’s needs.
To really get it right, however, the technology needed a
real-world program to put it through the paces. Gilead, with its focus on acute
traveler segmentation, which was entered into the profile and connected to the
company’s HR system for frequent updates, was an ideal partner for job.
“Gilead was our first mover,” said BCD Travel senior director
of the global client team Christina Reichelt. “They offered us a lot of
feedback that helped us refine the functionality.”
As expected, said Sitto, the system wasn’t perfect out of
the gate.
The first six months on the AI-supported agent tech was hit
and miss, and there was some negative feedback from users.
In particular, the technology wasn’t tuned properly for travel
bookers, who may be calling on behalf of any number of travelers. The system
might have picked up the booker’s own travel profile, or potentially the
profile of the last traveler they assisted, but it was different from the current
traveler. The system needed to learn the profile of those users and “realize”
that those users are associated with a number of different profiles.
To short-circuit potential frustration, BCD developed ‘barge
in’ capability that it shared with certain users that allowed those users to
skip irrelevant prompts. “We didn’t want to share that with everyone, because
we want the AI to continue to learn from the users,” said Reichelt.
And Sitto wanted that, too. “It’s reliant on the data, so we
also wanted to be sure our travelers weren’t calling in and just saying ‘agent,
agent, agent’ [to get past the prompts] because then it can’t learn,” he said,
adding that it took some traveler training in the form of webinars, in-person
talks and generally being available to answer questions to get everyone on
board. “Now,” he said, the proactive AI has become really expected, and when it
doesn’t happen, the travelers notice.”
According to Sitto, traveler satisfaction has increased by 20
percent with the newly configured program and AI-assisted agent service, and
costs to run the program through BCD have decreased by 15 percent.
According to BCD, the new telephony and email systems have
made a dent in travel program satisfaction for BCD clients—and productivity and
job satisfaction has increased for agents.
“We’re all working on it together and it has really improved
traveler satisfaction, and as a byproduct, it certainly helped us on the
productivity side, which is always something we’re looking to do,” said
Reichelt. She added that agents, who used to field traveler calls and emails that
randomly were assigned to the most available agent, felt more in control with
increased continuity.
“It does take first movers like Steve to deploy these new
technologies at scale and push us to make them better—not just for single
programs, but for many.”
More AI & Robotic Process Automation Underway
On a smaller scale, BCD is rolling out chatbot technology
that will allow travelers with simple requests, such as trip cancellations or
requesting a copy of a receipt, to do that easily through the BCD Travel app
and not contact an agent for that type of repetitive task.
Gilead was the first to test and advise on the development
of that bot to ensure it functions as a user-friendly addition to the app.
Other customers have since joined that effort. “It seems like a simple thing,
but it was manual. So if travelers can make key requests whenever they want and
we don’t have to involve an agent, that saves everyone time and it saves the
customer money,” said BCD Travel VP global client programs Brenda Catanesi.
Gilead is also piloting BCD Pay’s AI-powered payment
reconciliation process, as a way to lift a heavy manual process from Gilead’s
internal finance team. “We are moving more slowly on this one,” said Sitto, “but
we are working with the finance team to test reconciliation through AI to see
if it can save money, time or reduce errors.” The company is additionally
working with an AI-powered data solution that uses generative AI to mine travel
data and produce AI-powered reports.
“Steve is a radiant thinker. He’s got big ideas and he sees
how the different parts of ecosystem connect, and sees their potential,” said
Reichelt. “He’s not shy with being a first mover and he wants to be at the
forefront. He pushes his partners to join him there because he wants to be
there.”
Gilead senior director of global procurement business partnering
Aaron Moses reunited with Sitto at Gilead after working with him at Genentech
and has seen this type of work from him before.
“Steve takes a more
holistic approach to the travel program; he thinks progressively about how we
can propel the program in a way that will be most beneficial for our patients,”
said Moses. “Because when we think about life sciences, everything we do is for
the patients. The individuals that do the research, the individuals in sales,
no matter what area or for what reason they are traveling, they need to be able
to do their jobs and not be weighed down by a poor experience.”
To that end, Sitto insists he’s not in the innovation game
for wow factor. His recent engagements with innovation have been working with
legacy players behind the scenes to facilitate service—and he has ensured human
backup for every technology move, according to his BCD partners.
“Human centricity is really important; automation and AI
have to come with a balance,” said Sitto. “What are we doing in travel, anyway,
if it’s not about human interaction?”
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