Expedia, Inc., is the parent company to some of the world's leading travel companies, providing travel products and services to leisure and corporate travelers in the United States and around the world. It owns and operates a diversified portfolio of well-recognized brands, including expedia.com, hotels.com, hotwire.com, TripAdvisor, Egencia, Classic Vacations, and a range of other domestic and international businesses. The company's travel offerings consist of airline flights, hotel stays, car rentals, destination services, cruises, and package travel provided by various airlines, lodging properties, car rental companies, destination service providers, cruise lines, and other travel product and service companies on a stand-alone and pack- age basis. It also facilitates the booking of hotel rooms, airline seats, car rentals, and destination services from its travel suppliers. It acts as an agent in the transaction, passing reservations booked by its travelers to the relevant airline, hotel, car rental company, or cruise line. Together, these popular brands and innovative businesses make Expedia the largest online travel agency in the world, the third largest travel company in the United States, and the fourth largest travel company in the world. Its mission is to become the largest and most profitable seller of travel in the world, by helping everyone everywhere plan and purchase everything in travel. Problem Customer satisfaction is key to Expedia's overall mission, strategy, and success. Because expedia.com is an online business, the customer's shopping experience is critical to Expedia's revenues. The online shopping experience can make or break an online business. It is also important that the customer's shopping experience is mirrored by a good trip experience. Because the customer experience is critical, all customer issues need to be tracked, monitored, and resolved as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a few years back, Expedia lacked visibility into the "voice of the customer." It had no uniform way of measuring satisfaction, of analyzing the drivers of satisfaction, or of determining the impact of satisfaction on the company's profitability or overall business objectives. Solution Expedia's problem was not lack of data. The customer satisfaction group at Expedia knew that it had lots of data. In all, there were 20 disparate databases with 20 different owners. Originally, the group charged one of its business analysts with the task of pulling together and aggregating the data from these various sources into a number of key measures for satisfaction. The business analyst spent 2 to 3 weeks every month pulling and aggregating the data, leaving virtually no time for analysis. Eventually, the group realized that it wasn't enough to aggregate the data. The data needed to be viewed in the context of strategic goals, and individuals had to take ownership of the results To tackle the problem, the group decided it needed a refined vision. It began with a detailed analysis of the fundamental drivers of the department's performance and the link between this performance and Expedia's overall goals. Next, the group converted these drivers and links into a score-card. This process involved three steps: 1. Deciding how to measure satisfaction. This required the group to determine which measures in the 20 databases would be useful for demonstrating a customer's level of satisfaction. This became the basis for the scorecards and KPIs. 2. Setting the right performance targets. This required the group to determine whether KPI targets had short-term or long-term pay-offs. Just because a customer was satisfied with his or her online experience did not mean that the customer was satisfied with the vendor providing the travel service. 3. Putting data into context. The group had to tie the data to ongoing customer satisfaction projects. The various real-time data sources are fed into a main database (called the Decision Support Factory). In the case of the customer satisfaction group, these include customer surveys, CRM systems, interactive voice response systems, and other customer-service systems. The data in the DSS Factory are loaded on a daily basis into several data marts and multidimensional cubes. Users can access the data in a variety of ways that are relevant to their particular business needs. Benefits Ultimately, the customer satisfaction group came up with 10 to 12 objectives that linked directly to Expedia's corporate initiatives. These objectives were, in turn, linked to more than 200 KPIs within the customer satisfaction group. KPI owners can build, manage, and consume their own scorecards, and managers and executives have a transparent view of how well actions are aligning with the strategy. The scorecard also provides the customer satisfaction group with the ability to drill down into the data underlying any of the trends or pat- terns observed. In the past, all of this would have taken weeks or months to do, if it was done at all. With the scorecard, the Customer Service group can immediately see how well it is doing with respect to the KPIs, which, in turn, are reflected in the group's objectives and the company's objectives. As an added benefit, the data in the system supports not only the customer satisfaction group, but also other business units in the company. For example, a frontline manager can analyze airline expenditures on a market-by-market basis to evaluate negotiated contract performance or determine the savings potential for consolidating spending with a single carrier. A travel manager can leverage the business intelligence to discover areas with high volumes of unused tickets or offline bookings and devise strategies to adjust behavior and increase overall savings. Case Study Questions 1. Who are the customers for Expedia.com? Why is customer satisfaction a very important part of their business? (4 marks) 2. How did Expedia.com improve customer satisfaction with scorecards? (4 marks) 3. What were the challenges Expedia experienced? (4 marks) 4. What was their proposed solution, and the obtained results? (4 marks) 5. What KPIs would you recommend to measure Expedia's customer satisfaction? (4 marks) 6. Do you think it would be beneficial for Expedia to open physical stores for customers to meet with travel agents in person? Explain why or why not. (5 marks) 7. Explain how you believe the step by step process is completed for Expedia's Order-to-Cash cycle