Incentive - December 2007 - (Page 36)

INTERVIEW By Anne Marie D. Lee Have Gnome Will Travel Empowering employees gives Travelocity a customer service edge I t’s easy to talk about customer service and employee empowerment, but what does it actually mean to apply these principles on a day-to-day basis? For starters, it takes a visionary leader, the only words to describe Michelle Peluso. A graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and with a master’s degree in economics, philosophy and politics from Pembroke College at Oxford University, Peluso was named president and CEO of Travelocity in 2003. She is also executive vice president of parent company Sabre Holdings. By reshaping existing policies and daring to create a travel company that is not afraid of accountability, Peluso has transformed Travelocity into a worldwide behemoth with a passion for travel and a hypersensitivity to the customer experience. Peluso speaks to Incentive about employee empowerment, incentives and corporate citizenship, and gives us the dish on everyone’s favorite gnome. How large is your sales force? the agents people dial in and speak to when they don’t want to book online. There are several hundred people around the globe who do hotel sales or advertising sales or corporate sales. Q A Is keeping them from going to the competition a concern? The biggest team that does sales is our partner marketing team that’s out with our hotels every day, competing for rates and positioning those on the site for sale, and then we also have a corporate sales team, a Travelocity business sales team, and we have an advertising sales team; and then we have of course a customer sales team, Travelocity has its own Bill of Rights posted on its Web site. How do you see to it that employees protect these company values? Q A First of all, it’s about a lot of training. When we went into customer championship and the guarantee, we had all-staff training sessions where every employee has A Absolutely. Because first of all, most of the people who come to Travelocity and work at Travelocity do so because they’re passionate about travel. And so they know the difference between a good 36 | Incentive | December 2007 | incentivemag.com PHOTO: © Dennis Chalkin Q A Retention of employees, whether it’s sales employees or just any employee, is critical. If there’s someone who’s talented, we want to do everything we can to make sure that they love their career at Travelocity. You obviously have to pay people fairly and well, and that’s just a basic thing. But I have a strong belief that people ultimately aren’t loyal over compensation or disloyal over lack of compensation, unless you’re really out of the realm. What gets people really energized and motivated is, are they passionate about the mission? Do they believe in it? Do they have a good manager? Do they seek career prospects? So I think that’s the harder stuff, but it’s the most important stuff when you think about overall retention. to attend empowerment sessions. And then for our agents—we have over 1,600 call center agents—they have to go through a two-day course on empowerment: role-play scenarios and how to resolve [problems], service skills. And we also gave them a lot more ability to make judgment calls. So the first thing is training and agent empowerment, the second one I’d say is policy changes. We did an enormous amount of change in policy to allow our agents to actually resolve problems. Now if you want to cancel your air ticket within 24 hours of when you booked, we’ll rebook you without charging a cancellation fee. That was a policy decision change. Reservation Rescue: If your reservation is lost or if a hotel’s overbooked, we now connect directly to hotel systems to prevent that from happening. There’s a bunch of different policy changes we made, so I’d say the second thing is really fundamentally looking at what’s driving dissatisfaction or driving customers to not be happy with something, and changing policy. The third I think is kind of relentless communication. Do you find that empowerment training is something that’s motivating for employees as well as beneficial to the company’s goals? Q http://incentivemag.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Incentive - December 2007

Incentive - December 2007
Contents
Editor’s Note: Revved Up
In the News
Cover Story: Rolls-Royce Empowers Its Own
Case Study: Booz Allen Hamilton
Beating Your Best
Incentive Primer: Add Value to Your Event
Keeping Safety In Mind
Incentive Interview
Potentials Here and Now
Research: Corporate Gifts Facts Report
Tabletop
Awards: Travel Gift Cards
Travel News
Viva Puerto Vallarta
Indigenous Spas
Advertiser Index
Off the Cuff: Ambassador Christoph Bubb
Luxury Brands Special Supplement

Incentive - December 2007