BTN's 2011 Travel Manager of the Year: Sapient's Michelle De Costa

In March 2010, Travel Procurement magazine described social media as a nascent phenomenon in corporate travel: "Still hesitant about adding to their workloads and grappling with IT departments, most corporate travel buyers have not offered social networking to company travelers." The magazine, a BTN sibling publication, cited a January 2010 survey indicating that social media was the least influential of several trends expected to impact travel programs that year—trailing globalization, meetings management, mobile technology, expense management automation and virtual meetings. What a difference 18 months makes.

By this summer, Business Travel News research found that 7 percent of 260 business travel buyers were using company social networks to communicate travel policy. That doesn't sound like a lot, but it's heady growth from basically zero. Travel managers are finding that, as a recent AirPlus study notes, social networking can "increase traveler satisfaction through real-time knowledge sharing; encourage and improve traveler camaraderie and morale; help travel managers understand what is most important to travelers/anticipate needs and help travel managers select preferred partners based on information shared by travelers."

Some see social media as yet another piece of work, another responsibility, and something they're not keen on adding to their plates.

For Sapient global travel manager Michelle De Costa, however, rethinking how she should communicate has been a boon. For helping pioneer the use of social media in managed travel and for taking a broader view of her company role as a communicator, Business Travel News last month named De Costa its 2011 Travel Manager of the Year.

Many buyers would not know about the potential benefits of social media if not for the likes of De Costa and a small handful of other trailblazers who not only implemented such programs but also, in appropriate fashion, shared their experiences publicly. De Costa's work first came to the attention of industry media in spring 2010 when she responded to the Travel Procurement article—which described merely the potential for social media—with a rare actual case study about it. "We have introduced social networking into our travel program through Yammer," she wrote. "It has been a great way to push non-critical information out to our people without bombarding them with multiple emails. I also have the opportunity to answer questions that people pose or tie subjects being discussed to travel. It is like Twitter, but closed to only those people at my company."

While the media hype surrounding social media until recently exceeded the topic's impact, the emergence of programs at Cisco, Deltek, Salesforce, Sapient and other firms has helped spark interest from travel management pros who might otherwise be reluctant. The interesting aspect of De Costa's initiative is how, as part of a general focus on communications, it elevated her role within her company and reinforced her position and program.

Freewheeling To Fair Warning

Three years ago, De Costa was an account services director at Boston's Garber Travel (now FCm Travel Solutions). Down the road at Sapient, the consulting firm's relatively new procurement department was not managing travel. "It was unmanaged, or managed on a local level," De Costa said. "There were some great programs, but it very much was a do-it-yourself environment. The company grew rapidly, so in 2008 the vice president of procurement, who is my boss, looked into the travel category. They selected a global supplier, but didn't have a travel manager or see the need for one. As the implementation was underway, various people were chipping in to make it happen, but they realized it was a very large job, so the director of procurement decided we did need a manager. I was recruited to finish the implementation of the agency globally, and then manage the program."

De Costa didn't want everybody to stop chipping in; instead, she started chirping out.

"Once the agency was put in place, my first year was about implementing but also getting people to use it," said De Costa. "It was very hard to change the behavior. You know, 'I'm super premier with this airline and I book on their website.' In late 2008, we started to publish a quarterly dashboard comparing expense transactions with agency transactions, and for three consecutive quarters we showed a 20 percent savings for bookings through the agency. A lot of it is policy, but also we had point-of-sale contracts in place."

"We gave people opportunity to be in the corporate travel program or work independently," said Sapient vice president of global procurement and real estate Stephen Bertolami. "We compared the results of those two programs. People generally made very good travel decisions, but lacked any understanding of our travel polices, hotel programs and negotiations."

By the third quarter of 2009, De Costa secured executive support for a new policy, effective January 2010, that included a "three strikes" rule in which a fourth violation results in only 80 percent travel expense reimbursement. Not using the agency for original air bookings counts as a strike.

"We tried to avoid that," said De Costa, outlining an area where communications alone is not enough. "We had tried a number of carrots. We reimbursed the Amex Rewards [membership fee] for top travelers using their corporate card and booking through the agency. We offered upgrade status only for those using the agency. We were randomly upgrading people. We held travel forums to understand why people were not using the agency. We did a lot of enhancements in the booking tools. But, unfortunately, it came to the point where we had to do a mandate, which was counter to our culture."

Once underway, the new short-reimbursement policy was "very effective." With each strike, De Costa personally talks to the traveler. Only two employees in 2010 were penalized.

Having heard travelers complain about the booking tool and also claim that the agency was not offering the lowest fare, Sapient used Topaz International to audit bookings and found that while the agency attained the lowest fares 98 percent of the time, online booking tools did not perform as well.

De Costa worked with procurement to develop a TMC RFP, source and vet suppliers, and choose a new one. She included a committee of stakeholders from each country to be affected by the new global agency relationship. They held conference calls and relied heavily on external references in each market. This quick process in June resulted in Sapient implementing Travelocity Business in Europe and North America, with an Asia/Pacific implementation to follow. Sapient is using Travelocity Business' Radius partnership for local support in some markets.

Getting Social

With the new policy and new TMC came a new means of communicating to travelers. De Costa in early 2010 became one of the top contributors to her company's Yammer site, which can be accessed only by company employees. "It has been a great way to push non-critical information out to our people without bombarding them with multiple emails," De Costa said at the time. "I also have the opportunity to answer questions that people pose, or tie subjects being discussed to travel."

Within a year, Yammer became "a collaboration tool for the entire company, built on a small idea from travel," De Costa said this spring. "I'm excited that in an IT and business consulting company, travel had this idea that went gangbusters through the organization, and we have been credited with that."

In fact, De Costa was asked to be part of an evaluation and sourcing committee set up to choose a new companywide social media tool.

"The communication team reached out to the procurement team to do a full social and business collaboration RFP—the next level of Yammer to really collaborate across business units across the globe," said De Costa. "The team started the sourcing, and the communications team—not the procurement team of which I was a member—asked me to participate with the business owners" and representatives from information technology, senior management, communications and procurement.

Sapient used Ariba Sourcing and generated five bids, but found the selection process more challenging than, say, a TMC RFP, because many of the social enterprise tech providers were new at dealing with a procurement process.

"For some, it was the first time they ever answered an electronic RFP," said De Costa. "Some gave good detail; others just linked to their websites. The answers really varied, so it required a lot of clarification from team members on the answers." After a bidders' call that featured what De Costa considered a very small number of questions from the bidders, Sapient narrowed the field to three, including incumbent Yammer. Following in-person presentations, Sapient chose Jive Software.

Broadening The Role

Asked how other travel managers might view their positions vis-a-vis enterprise social media, De Costa said, "I don't think they would normally be included, so I definitely think it's about figuring out a way to be included. Travel managers could even lead the charge and have the company do this. This is important to the organization, not just to travel." Like remote conferencing, social media intellectually can be put into the same bucket as travel itself—all are communications tools. "There's a piece of that to it," she said, "The idea is to help you collaborate and take away some of that need to have a meeting."

One concern about corporate social media among travel buyers has been that it could damage compliance as travelers gripe about preferred vendors, but De Costa has found that even in a culture that until recently was unmanaged, "My travelers are my greatest champions of the program. If they mention a hotel they love and someone else reads it, it puts more visibility into our preferred suppliers and our programs, and what's working, and also into who I am. I'm not in India. I'm not in Russia. Now they realize someone's running the travel program and who that person is, and they can reach out to us directly."

In turn, De Costa's approach has further validated her place in the firm. "I have taken the track of growing from a communications standpoint, which has definitely worked," she said. "Now I handle communications for travel, for the procurement team, and now for the entire finance department. They approached me to be the communications champion for the finance team, writing articles, talking about anything new. I have started a series of articles for real estate about office changes and openings."

Originally published in the Sept. 12, 2011, issue of Business Travel News.