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 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 traveler needs. Travelers 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 traveler 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 behavioral data. CRMs are critical for companies to create and grow strong relationships through personalized 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 travelers within every travel program, 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 behavior 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.

Five ways CTM Advisor empowers personal service

1. CTM agents see traveler behavior, preferences, and policy in one place
2. Real-time trip updates and alerts inform agents of disruption for travelers
3. Different regional agent teams can support travelers, no matter where they booked
4. Company trends help agents recommend preferred and popular travel choices
5. Policy quick-search lets agents inform travelers 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 provide superior customer service experiences for every single traveler 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 programs 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 traveler 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 traveler 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 travelers, referencing their colleague’s trip behaviors – like popular hotels near local offices – not only helps put infrequent travelers at ease, it helps drive preferred partner adoption to influence greater savings and benefits in the long-term.

Skip the line, not the savings – rapid rebooking

Travelers 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 canceled 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 travelers 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 travelers 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 traveler 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 traveler record in two clicks if they need to confirm a booking that’s on hold or make a change.

For traveler 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 travelers 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 travelers, the same duty of care and risk guidance we provide directly to program managers and HR teams shows in CTM Advisor, alerting our team to potential dangers a traveler 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 traveler safety and security by employers in a demanding labor 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, travelers 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 traveler’s flight has been canceled, 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.”