Analysis: How Expedia Corporate Travel Implemented an Easily Customized System

COMPANY: Expedia Corporate Travel is a division of a $2.2 billion online travel agency.

BUSINESS: Expedia Corporate Travel offers online booking tools to help business travelers schedule trips more quickly and to reduce travel costs for their employers.

CHALLENGE: While online booking is a mainstay of the vacation and personal travel market, business travelers require additional help and options. This requires the new business unit to find ways to create efficiencies and quickly experiment with new ways of doing business. This requires a fast and easy way to make changes to the CRM system.

IMPLEMENTATION: This is a standard salesforce.com implementation that, with the addition of a custom designed tab, provides the account processing team members with secure access to a single screen containing all the information they need to get new customers up and running.

CUSTOMIZATION: A marketing manager without a programming background modifies the basic salesforce.com system as necessary. For example, by customizing the workflow, Expedia has managed to decrease the time it takes to turn around new accounts from three or four days to just two days.

EXTENSIONS: None, but the company is looking at various AppExchange solutions to expand the system’s capabilities.

ANALYSIS: This engagement provides a role model for five reasons:

• CRM doesn’t necessarily mean a complicated integration process. What we have here is a relatively straightforward sales process, which to support it with CRM, simply requires minor tweaks to a basic system. The out-of-the-box salesforce.com system is powerful enough to accommodate the basic operations of the travel agency function without getting into complex back-end integration issues.

• CRM needn’t involve the participation of the IT group. The marketing manager tasked with updating and customizing the system has a background in project management rather than programming. Despite this, the basic level of customization built into salesforce.com is sufficiently easy to use that she can perform relatively sophisticated modifications required to support the specific sales process.

• CRM must evolve when the business evolves. Given the pace of change in the highly competitive travel industry, supporting online booking for corporate travel is undergoing rapid evolution. As Expedia’s business grows in this segment, the CRM system will be able to grow and change as necessary to support emerging requirements, without the extra expense of hiring programmers and consultants.

• CRM need not involve a major investment. On-demand systems like salesforce.com are usually much less expensive to launch than in-house systems. In fact, with in-house systems, making a change after implementation can be almost as big a project as installing the system in the first place. This is not to say that there aren’t some situations where an in-house system doesn’t make sense, only that such situations are few and far between.

• CRM must have a secure database. As with any system that deals with financial data, a CRM system for business travel must keep that data extraordinarily secure. Under such circumstances, customization can pose a risk because the customizations might expose weaknesses in the system. However, since Expedia’s customization takes place under salesforce.com’s Apex Builder program, they’re automatically given the same security model that rules the rest of salesforce.com’s systems, thereby ensuring ongoing security.