Leading travel services organizations use Merced Systems’ Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management applications to standardize operational processes and optimize sales. Travel service operations must have access to timely performance data in order to remain agile when selling product bundles with varying profit margins and time bound travel offers. Sales Performance Management and Service Performance Management helps travel service companies maximize margin and maintain customer loyalty by:

• Focusing employee sales on key offers through comprehensive incentive plans that reward sales of featured travel bundles, special offers as well as accommodating evolving incentive programs
• Increasing employee self-correction and motivation through the distribution of dashboards and reports to every role in the organization
• Improving representative performance and quality on internal processes through automated coaching and development workflows
• Enabling analytics to uncover sales and service improvement opportunities and then monitor for progress in these campaigns
  

Case Study

Major Travel Service Provider Increases Sales Margin and Directional Selling with Merced Incentive Compensation Management

The Drive for Change

This travel company implemented Merced Incentive Compensation Management to accomplish two goals. First, the company wanted to drive accountability for performance and earning capacity from each individual employee. Second, the company wanted to promote a performance-driven culture closely aligned with payment and reward by quickly and effectively communicating changes in sales plans to the front line.

The Merced Incentive Compensation Management Solution

To accomplish these goals, the client selected Merced Incentive Compensation Management (Merced ICM) because of its flexibility and scalability the client also selected Merced ICM because of its ability to allow commission teams to rapidly analyze, modify and create incentive plans to address the company’s evolving business strategy. Merced ICM enabled the client to implement a global business solution to calculate commissions, thereby reducing reliance on manual, error prone spreadsheets. Since deployment, the company’s incentive plans have effectively channeled employee behavior to drive more directional selling. As a result of Merced ICM, the client has been able to promote accountability – empowering employees to manage their own performance, and creating a performance-driven culture.

Rapid ROI

As a result of implementing Merced ICM, the productivity of sales advisers has increased by 11%. The client has also correlated performance with use of Merced ICM, identifying an impressive pattern in which 100% of all sales staff logged into their personalized dashboards 15 minutes prior to the start of their shift and directly after they ended – an impressive validation of positive performance as a result of aligning activity with incentives.

The client has also identified a significant shift in sales behavior. While previously flight sales had been the main driver of sales, sales of travel insurance has increased by 21%, accommodation sales have increased by 14%, and tour sales has increased by 6%

Additional Case Studies

Leading Business Travel Service Provider — Fortune 100 company

This leading travel services organization recognized the need to standardize common processes and metrics throughout the organization. With agents in a variety of traditional contact centers and on-premise travel offices, this Fortune 100 Company uses the Merced Performance Suite to create an enterprise view of its operations across three distinct operations.

In addition to distributing critical performance dashboards and reports, Merced Performance Suite's integrated workflow is being used to automate key managerial processes including:

• Coaching
• Recognition
• Ticket Error processes

By automating processes within the Merced Performance Suite, this travel services provider has retired old systems, reducing the number of applications that need to be maintained, while increasing visibility into critical aspects of their operation not possible before.