Social media channels for many hosted and independent agents have proven to be a huge boon. They're a cheap, simple way to market a business, advertise deals and keep in touch with old clients while courting new ones.
But they can also be a huge pain. Maintaining an active presence on all channels, each with their own tone, and chasing likes and friends and retweets can rob agents of time better spent; specifically, selling travel.
Host agency Andavo Travel is trying to offer a prescription with the 2017 introduction of Compass, a social media program for independent contractors. In it, an Andavo digital marketing specialist can manage social media accounts on each platform for each of Andavo's 140 hosted agents, most of whom do not use the Andavo brand.
That's a lot of tweeting. But it's a natural opportunity for Andavo to add value for its hosted agents, said Mike Cameron, CEO of Andavo parent Christopherson Andavo Travel, ranked No. 24 on the 2018 Power List.
"They felt like they needed to get into the social media game, they wanted to have a marketing presence on social media, they didn't know how to do it, they didn't have time to do it," Cameron said. "Perfect opportunity for us to bring in a specialist and manage it for them."
Andavo surveys of agents using the social media program show it has been well received, Cameron said, adding that each agent respondent said they would recommend it to a peer.
"That's the most important score," he said. "Eighty-eight percent said they were comfortable with Andavo managing all their social media. The other 12% were neutral. One hundred percent said they were attracted because they didn't have time for social media themselves. One hundred percent said they wanted to expand their business presence within social media, and that's why they outsourced it to us."
Andavo's surveys about the efficacy of the social media program underscore another tech move from Christopherson Andavo. The agency soon will use digital platform Qualtrics to quantitatively measure customers' experiences with travel advisers and employees' engagement with the company. Business travel division Christopherson Business Travel is integrating Qualtrics with its AirPortal travel dashboard and mobile app.
"You integrate it into everything you do in a way that you measure the experience at the time they're having the experience, or shortly thereafter," Cameron said of Qualtrics. "You're not just sending out a blast survey every 90 days to everybody who does business with you. You're capturing the fact that they just booked their travel with you, or they just finished a trip. You can measure that part of the experience at that time."
Christopherson, meanwhile, entirely rebuilt the AirPortal platform in part to make it a responsive web application, ensuring that it will operate on desktop, tablet and smartphone alike. Cameron called it "a big investment."
"Prior to that, we had an AirPortal app, a native app that was in the Google app store as well as the Apple app store ... and then we had a desktop version," Cameron said.
"We made it so that's fully responsive for all devices, which I think you have to do with everything these days."
Christopherson last year, in what Cameron called an industry first, partnered with business-intelligence company Domo to release three travel apps: Travel Analytics, a travel analytic dashboard; Travel Hotel Analyzer, which enables a user to see all organizational traveler hotel stays in a given area; and Travel Leakage, which lets users integrate general ledger or expense data with TMC data to identify and correct program leakage. Christopherson also uses the product internally to measure its own performance.
"For example, our operations managers use it to review their travel advisers' performance," Cameron said. "We even put it in the hands of the travel advisers, so they can review their own performance. We review our vendor performance in real time, so if we're meeting with a vendor, we can easily pull this data up in real time without asking for reports from the accounting department prior to meeting."
Helping to manage these initiatives and Christopherson Andavo's growth is a newly enlarged senior management team, at 27 executives from 20 before.
"We made some significant investments in our leadership team," Cameron said. "We expanded our leadership team about one-third in one year, including a couple of vice president positions, [for which] we brought some people in from the outside to help us manage the growth."