After examining the various uses of data for pre-trip and on-trip innovations, this week we share with you insights gained from our third webinar in The Business Trip Life Cycle series for post-trip innovation, “Data Strategies to Create Context.” Data is an often discussed topic in travel management with report after report being aggregated, but without context and the correct approach, the data is useless. Learn more about implementing innovation in the business trip life cycle: https://www.concur.com/blog

1. The Business Trip Life Cycle
IMPLEMENTING INNOVATION: PART THREE
Post-Trip Innovation
DATA STRATEGIES TO
CREATE CONTEXT
Data is often considered the ultimate goal
of managing travel. It allows a corpora-tion
to gain visibility into spend and to get
a deeper understanding about how to optimize
travel program policies and processes. Yet, it re-mains
one of the most underutilized tools in the
travel management toolbox. There are reasons for
this: Without context, data can be flat and hard to
understand. Post-trip data innovation, therefore,
needs to re-imagine how travel managers use data
to make it more manageable and meaningful.
In a recent webinar from The BTN Group and
Concur, travel management innovators shared
some of their most exciting post-trip strategies and
innovation forecasts. To watch the webinar and
hear all the strategies presented, click here.
STOP LOOKING WITHIN THE DATA
FOR BUSINESS PROBLEMS
“Data by itself is useless. It’s just an unorganized,
random set of facts, but in the industry we’ve relied
upon it for a long time,” said Brian Tarble, Concur’s
director of global product management and data in-sight,
speaking on the September webinar. “We’ve
approached data with the mindset that ‘if I get all this
data and some reports, I can figure out what to do
with it.’ We are looking into the data to find problems.
What we need to do is to understand the business
problem first, and then look to the data to solve it.”
There is a shift in the industry toward smarter
use of data—“letting the data work for you, rather
than you working for the data,” said Tarble—but
the progress toward realizing this utility lies chang-ing
the approach:
1. Identify the business problem first
2. Understand what data would be necessary
to provide insight into that problem
3. Determine if the data set is in house, or if it is
externally available
4. Think critically about whether the problem is
worth solving
Travel managers must then understand who should
be consuming this data, and how it is best presented.
Is it optimal to provide static charts and dashboards,
or will stakeholders need interactive access to the
data to build queries for their own analysis?
“A lot of the conversations I have revolve around
the idea that data is good, but if we can’t make it
easy for executives/directors to make decisions,
it’s useless,” said Tarble. Indeed, data exercises will
remain academic unless the corporation can take
action on the intelligence they derive from their data.
GET BEYOND THE NUMBERS
Kathleen Kaden, the former global travel manager
for Cognizant Technologies, gained context to sup-port
travel program data by going outside of tradi-tional
sources and direct to travelers. While imple-menting
the managed program at Cognizant, Kaden
concurrently developed a series of automated
VIEW THE
ON-DEMAND
WEBINAR:
POST-TRIP
INNOVATION:
AGGREGATING,
ANALYZING &
ACTING ON DATA

2. post-trip traveler surveys to measure trip quality
and gain insights into the traveler experience.
“The surveys are based on the idea that percep-tion
is just as important as fact,” said Kaden. “Often
you need to aggregate perception to get real infor-mation
you can work with.”
Working with free online survey tools, Kaden
created a short survey that gathered satisfaction
rates around TMC services and online booking, as
well as air, hotel and car suppliers. Surveys were
customized per region to include only relevant sup-pliers
and, very importantly, Kaden formulated the
survey to offer an “open response” opportunity that
allows Cognizant travelers to voice detailed com-mentary
about their travel experiences.
“Travelers take advantage of that,” she said.
“Sometimes it’s positive and sometimes negative,
but it really helps us to get the word out and has
contributed to other changes in our program.”
Traveler feedback from the surveys is used to
inform conversations with suppliers, said Kaden,
citing one-off communications to suppliers to better
understand trip disruptions for an individual traveler,
but also in a larger context of supplier management
as patterns develop.
“We had a European carrier that we were strug-gling
with; we were falling short on our volume com-mitments,”
Kaden said. “What we found in the survey
data was, due to the carrier’s short connection in their
hub, many of our travelers carrying Indian passports
were getting stuck in the airport for 24 hours.”
With context around the volume shortfall, Cogni-zant
changed its agreement with the carrier, and the
carrier actually went back and reviewed their connec-tion
times. Kaden had a similar experience with an
extended stay hotel chain within her program, where
survey feedback informed her traditional data analy-sis
and led to meaningful changes in vendor offerings.
“Survey feedback proved important,” Kaden
concluded. “It gives us the ability to have a better
dialog with supplier, leads to better contracts, asso-ciate
needs are met, and we get more compliance
and volume with preferreds. That makes suppliers
happier, and we meet our contract obligations.”
PHASING OUT THE POST-TRIP?
Optimizing post-trip practices within current industry
frameworks is certainly one way to look at post-trip in-novation,
but Concur’s Brian Tarble and BCD Travel’s
director of emerging technologies, Miriam Moscovici,
both envision a future where post-trip activities shift
their position within the business trip lifecycle.
“The post-trip phase is critical, but there’s a lot of
opportunity left in it,” said Moscovici. “We get valu-able
feedback and intelligence from our data. We
analyze and prep strategy for our programs… But
we want to see the day when we don’t come home
and take a survey or fill out an expense report. You
don’t have to debrief so others can learn from it.
We want to see these activities brought up in the
lifecycle and occur in the moment they are happen-ing
and when feedback is most important.”
Several expense providers have moved the nee-dle
clearly into this territory, with mobile expense
reporting that allows travelers to build reports on the
road. Mobile messaging and surveys are another
opportunity to minimize the traditional post-trip data
round-up, and move these activities into real time.
Tarble offered a sneak peek into a technology
rollout that will push back-end data management
into new territory, as well.
“We are still used to looking at data from last
month and basing current decisions on old data,”
he said. “Concur wants to enable clients to use
data to automatically take action. How do we get
this information and drive change while we can still
have some impact on the bottom line?”
Concur is launching a smart messaging sys-tem
that is based on back-end data triggers that
will alert travel stakeholders about opportunities to
make immediate impacts to their travel programs.
Alert areas could include:
• Budget Alerts: Taking into account actuals, ac-cruals
and booked (but not executed) itineraries
• Supplier Volume Alerts: Notifying travel man-agers
that they have met volume obligations and
may want to re-preference their booking tool dis-play
to drive market share to another supplier
• Country-by-Country Tax Rules
• Critical Passport/Visa Information
• Real-Time Fraud Alerts
“We are getting more and better data through
the lifecycle—and we can use it in a more sophis-ticated
manner,” said Moscovici.
Tarble agreed. “The technology is finally starting to
align with the vision that we’ve had for a long time.”
NOW ON DEMAND! “Implementing Inno-vation:
The Business Trip Lifecycle” is available on-demand
at www.businesstravelnew.com/webinars.
Log in today to view the three-part series presented
by The BTN Group and Concur.
ABOUT
CONCUR
Concur is a leading
provider of integrated
travel and expense
management solutions.
Concur’s easy-to-use
Web-based and mobile
solutions help com-panies
control costs,
save time and protect
employees. Concur’s
open platform enables
the entire travel and
expense ecosystem to
access and extend
Concur’s T&E cloud.
Concur’s systems adapt
to individual corporate
and employee prefer-ences,
and scale to
meet the needs of
companies from small
to large.
Learn more at
www.concur.com
POST-TRIP INNOVATION
DATA STRATEGIES TO CREATE CONTEXT