As Its Business Evolves, Expedia Corporate Travel Customizes CRM in Minutes

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Challenge

• Create efficiencies in a new—and evolving—Expedia business unit

Solution

• A custom tab in Salesforce consolidates information and improves workflow for the account processing team

Results

• The team can turn around new accounts more quickly now; the average time has dropped from 3-4 days to just 2

As Its Business Evolves, Expedia Corporate Travel Customizes CRM in Minutes

Business travelers are always in a hurry. Help them save time—in the security line, at the gate, or when they're setting up the trip to begin with—and you'll make their day. Expedia Corporate Travel offers intuitive online booking tools to not only help those harried business travelers schedule trips more quickly, but also to reduce travel costs for their employers.

Saving time and money is on Expedia's itinerary, too, and so is the security of its customer data. That's why Expedia appreciates the flexibility of its customer relationship management (CRM) solution from salesforce.com to readily adapt to the unique and evolving needs of its fast-paced business.

Expedia Marketing and Analysis Manager Heidi Asplund can quickly modify Salesforce to support and improve the company's processes in a matter of minutes. For example, Asplund wanted to help the account processing department work more efficiently. She simply point-and-clicked her way to building a whole new section right within Salesforce—adding a new tab to manage new account processing.

The custom-designed tab provides account processing team members with single-screen, secure access to all the information they need to get new customers up and running quickly. By also 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.

Importantly, protecting customer data from broader company access is just as easy as setting up a custom tab. "Since the same security model that rules Salesforce also governs my customizations, I can be sure that only authorized users access the information in our new tab. With Force.com Builder, setting up that security just took a couple quick clicks," explains Asplund.

Custom CRM in Ten Minutes Flat

A veteran of CRM implementations at other companies, Asplund appreciates the ability to make significant modifications on the fly. "What's unique about Salesforce is that when we decide we want to make a change, I can go in and do it myself, and ten minutes later, it's done," she says.

That's not insignificant, given the pace of change in the competitive travel industry. Expedia's Corporate Travel business is just a couple of years old, and as processes evolve and the business grows, Asplund can modify Salesforce right along with it. "I don't know another system where we could make changes like that without spending a lot of time and money on programmers and consultants," says Asplund. "With other solutions, making a change after implementation is almost as big of a project as installing it in the first place."

Despite her past CRM experience, Asplund is no programming expert—her background is in project management—but that has not been a barrier to her performing the types of sophisticated modifications that Expedia needed. "I find Salesforce easy to customize myself, with no need to involve our IT department. With Force.com Builder it's easy to self-serve and make adjustments to Salesforce in real time," says Asplund. Sounds about as easy as booking a flight on Expedia.

Expedia, Inc. is the fourth-largest travel agency in the United States. The corporate travel arm of Expedia is full-service corporate travel agency that focuses on helping companies achieve significant cost savings, largely through high adoption of its intuitive, online booking tools.
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