CTM Advisor: Empowering service intelligence
New technology can often replace or completely remove processes from the way we live and work. Joel Bailey, Corporate Travel Management’s (CTM’s) North America CTO wants technology that empowers as much as it automates. “At CTM we believe booking travel directly with one of our team should feel like calling an old friend. Online booking is a critical part of travel today, but there will always be occasions where speaking with a real human, over email, chat or the phone is what the traveller needs. Travellers want to be understood, cared for, and treated as individuals rather than support tickets.
That’s why we built CTM Advisor, the most intelligent business traveller CRM.”
What’s a CRM?
CRMs, or customer relationship management platforms, have existed since the late eighties. They are a way for companies to record their customer and contact profiles alongside the products and services they purchase and other forms of demographic and behavioural data. CRMs are critical for companies to create and grow strong relationships through personalised interactions with their customers, especially at scale.
By putting customer information into the hands of the teams that service them, CRMs help employees from Product, Sales or Customer Success to know the customer, quickly identify their needs, and exceed their expectations.
What’s different about CTM Advisor?
Travel companies use CRMs as much as any other business. But at CTM, we don’t just communicate with senior stakeholders like travel managers and procurement teams. We service the needs of hundreds or even thousands of travellers within every travel programme, and each one is unique.
CTM Advisor doesn’t just tell us who you are and what your preferred airline is, it shows us real-time travel behaviour trends for individuals, their colleagues, and companies combined with their unique travel policies built-in. When your flight’s delayed, we know. When your colleagues always book a preferred hotel by the Manhattan office, we know. When there’s a high-risk security alert for your destination, we know. CTM Advisor is the smartest app you’ll never see.
5 Ways CTM Advisor empowers personal service
- CTM Agents see traveller behaviour, preferences and policy in one place
- Real-time trip updates and alerts inform agents of disruption for travellers
- Different regional agent teams can support travellers, no matter where they booked
- Company trends help agents recommend preferred and popular travel choices
- Policy quick-search lets agents inform travellers what they can and can’t book in seconds
The products we sell in travel are unique too. Flights, hotels and other travel elements are high-value, dynamically-priced, limited inventory products. If bad weather means your £12 Amazon package turns up 2 hours late, it’s not a huge deal. If your £5,000 international connecting flight for a critical business meeting does, it’s a different story.
CTM Advisor isn’t built for Sales teams. It’s built specifically for our front-line service agents, to deliver the tools and information they need to deliver superior customer service experiences for every single traveller because we know what’s important to you. In our recent CTM 2022 Global Customer Survey, our global customers (operating in three or more continents) told us the number one priority for their global travel programmes in the year ahead is “customer service”.
Service without borders
The power of a dedicated business travel CRM means you can book your travel in one country with one team, and then pick up the phone from the other side of the world, trusting the local team to know exactly who you are, where you’re heading and what you need. Unlike siloed mega-agencies, CTM Advisor lets us know you, no matter where your travels take you.
The real magic is in how it helps experienced travel pros deliver personal service, even to a traveller they might have never spoken to before.
Your policy might say an Executive’s preferred airline is American Airlines or British Airways, but CTM Advisor goes further by showing our agents that your traveller always takes the direct overnight flight from JFK to LHR at 7:10 pm on Monday so they land early Tuesday morning for a day of meetings.
For new travellers, referencing their colleague’s trip behaviours – like popular hotels near local offices – not only helps put infrequent travellers at ease, it helps drive preferred partner adoption to influence greater savings and benefits in the long-term.
Skip the queue, not the savings – rapid rebooking
Travellers sometimes try to skirt around policy measures by booking offline through their agent at short notice, especially when disruption strikes and they need to rebook a cancelled flight at the last minute. CTM Advisor shows us cancellations or when a delay will result in a missed connection but makes sure the company policy is easily accessible and clearly visible to your servicing agent. You can count on us to only book what’s compliant for your travellers to keep your costs down.
The need for speed – quick policy answers for your team
How well do you know your travel policy? Even if you do, it’s often the case that new travellers aren’t familiar with approval limits or route-specific policy criteria, so they ask us. We don’t like keeping your people waiting so we’ve built natural language search capabilities into our quick find policy checker. They can tell the traveller in just a few seconds exactly which hotel they can, and can’t, stay in. And to save our agents even more time, we built their very own service log, so they can quickly jump back to a traveller record in two clicks if they need to confirm a booking that’s on hold or make a change.
For traveller safety, two’s company, three’s a crowd
Many companies have limits on the number of executives who can fly together. Some agencies support this by running time-consuming checks on queued and ticketed bookings against employee lists before alerting travellers and rebooking them on an alternate flight. CTM Advisor solves this problem before it even occurs, showing us who’s on every flight before a booking is made.
In the event that there’s a critical risk to your travellers, the same duty of care and risk guidance we provide directly to programme managers and HR teams shows in CTM Advisor, alerting our team to potential dangers a traveller is facing so they can quickly respond.
Global business travel done differently
The pursuit of 100% online adoption for business travel booking has been tempered by COVID concerns. The rising value of human interaction in an increasingly digital world and the need for certainty of business traveller safety and security by employers in a demanding labour market puts the emphasis back on delivering great experiences for our customers and colleagues.
It’s time to do things differently, and that means embracing both sides of the argument according to Mike Kubasik, CTM’s Global Chief Technology Officer. “In 2022 and beyond, travellers and travel managers need the best of both worlds: the intuitive, fast online booking available in our award-winning Lightning OBT, and exceptional, personal, proactive service where it’s needed. It doesn’t matter if a traveller’s flight has been cancelled, they’re unsure what hotel is popular with local colleagues, or they just want their London consultants to have easy access to reservations made with their New York team, CTM Advisor always has the answer. It’s the smartest app you’ll never see.”
“We really are raising the bar on personal service, showing our customers how well we truly know them, because speaking with our agent teams really should be like calling an old friend.”
CTM Advisor will be showcased at the Business Travel Show on June 29th & 30th at London’s ExCel Centre. To book an appointment with the team, click here.
