Using ClientBase for Corporate Clients

Sharon Meyer, Product Manager

For many years agencies have been using ClientBase to manage their leisure clients. ClientBase was originally developed as a CRM tool geared towards helping agencies increase their leisure business through effective marketing, enhanced relationships and more efficient processing. Did you know that ClientBase also provides great tools and features geared towards helping you manage your corporate clients?

Whether your agents handle a combination of both leisure and corporate business, or whether you have separate leisure agents and separate corporate agents, ClientBase is an invaluable tool for both. Below are some ideas on how you can use ClientBase to better manage your corporate clients.

• We all know the 80/20 rule. 80% of the business usually comes from 20% of your clients. If that is the case for your corporate business, then you should be carefully managing the relationships with that top 20%. To start, you should know and track who they are. This can be easily obtained through a Travel History Query in ClientBase.
  
  
  • First, determine how many corporate clients represent 20% of all of your corporate clients. You can do this by querying for all Corporate type clients and clicking the Count button. Calculate how many represent 20% of that total. For example if you have 300 corporate clients 60 would represent 20% of 300.
  • Next, query for your “Top X” clients, to get your top 20%. Go to Level 2 Query, click on the General Info tab and set the Profile Type to Corporate. Then click the Travel History tab and enter the number of clients calculated above (in the example it was 60) into the Top X Sales Total filter.
  • Click OK to get your top 20% producing corporate clients based on total past purchases.
  • Save this query as a folder (File|Save|Query As) and reference it on an on-going basis as the clients appearing may change over time. If a good Corporate client suddenly drops from this list, you may want to touch base to make sure you’ve not lost any of their business. If a new client appears, you want to make sure proper follow-up (as suggested below) is in place.
    
• Use Reminders in ClientBase to manage the on-going relationship and general communications with these (and possibly other) important Corporate clients. Things like timing of corporate reports, statements, general touch-base calls, marketing calls, sending cards/gifts etc. Provide more personal service to keep good accounts and make sure that at any given time there is some kind of on-going follow-up Reminder in place. Many times agencies wait until they don’t hear from a Corporate client to bother touching base with them. All too often it’s a mute point by then. Click the Reminder button on the profile toolbar to create one or several Reminders within a Corporate profile to manage the on-going relationship. (These presently must be created one at a time.)
  
• Use CB+ Travel History queries to look for accounts that have not booked travel within a certain period of time and follow-up accordingly. You can easily query for corporate clients that have not done business with you within a particular time frame. Use the Level 3 Query and set the Profile Type to Corporate within the General Info tab. Click the Travel History tab and set the Filter Type to “Does Not have Travel History with the following Criteria”. Enter an Issue Date From and To Range for either the last 30, 60 or 90 days. Use Date Formulas so that the Query can be saved and run on an on-going basis (for example From =-30,0,0 To =). Press OK to run the Query, and select File|Save Query As to save it. Regularly look for Corporate clients that aren’t booking with you but should and follow-up accordingly.
  
• Use the Merge to Letter, Merge to E-mail, and Merge to Label features in ClientBase to streamline communications and make corporate agents more efficient. Once your Corporate profiles are built properly with complete mailing addresses, e-mail addresses, phone numbers and employee listings, it becomes a snap for an agent to print a label, draft a letter, or send an e-mail to that account. By streamlining repetitious tasks of this nature, your Corporate agents become more efficient.
  
• Build separate leisure profiles for each employee of your corporate accounts and send Travel Surveys to them in an attempt to start getting their leisure business as well. Travel Surveys can be printed from within a profile by clicking the “Print” button, or from the results of a Query by going to Reports|Profile Reports|Client Survey. Travel Surveys can also be e-mailed as an attachment by using the Merge to E-mail feature, clicking the Attachment tab and placing a checkmark in the Client Survey attachment box. Make sure any Frequent Flyer numbers and other travel needs (use Copy/Paste from Employee tab) are copied into the Leisure profile so that same level of service can be provided for their leisure travel. Use the Group field within all the leisure profiles created to capture the corporate account name and tie all future corporate and leisure business together in one report if desired.
  
• Use the Merge to PNR feature to seamlessly format all profile data for any or all of the GDS, including Apollo, Amadeus, Sabre and Worldspan. Between the customizable PNR Rules and the PNR Entry tables at the Branch, Agent, Profile and Passenger levels, any data you need to start a PNR can be sent via ClientBase.
  
• Want to keep a record of a quoted price and itinerary that doesn’t end up getting booked? Create a Res Card and copy and paste the PNR details into the Res Card Agent Notes area. Prior to ignoring the PNR, highlight the entire PNR, press Ctrl C to copy and then using Ctrl V,paste into the Res Card.
  
• Use the Merge to E-mail feature to easily e-mail the quoted flight/hotel options given over the phone via same copy/paste process.
  
• Use the Travel History tab within the Corporate profile to lookup past hotels and itineraries that many times travelers assume you have access to, or you remember. No need to go to the bookkeeper or to dig through old invoices, when all the details are available within the ClientBase Corporate profile. (They don’t go away after the client travels like PNR’s do!) You can even filter the Travel History within a corporate profile by travel category, date frame, passenger name and more by clicking the “Custom Query” button within the Travel History tab.
  
• Use the Travel History tab within the Corporate profile to view ticket numbers to see if they are voided instead of turning these over to Accounting.
  
• Use the Res Card and Live Connect for bookings made outside of the GDS to avoid passive segments. The Res Card allows you to generate invoices that automatically land in TRAMS Back Office without the need to put anything into a PNR.
  
• In addition to managing your Corporate clients, managing your vendors and their contact information is another part of a Corporate agent’s role. ClientBase allows agents to get rid of their rolodexes and phone books and allows the agency to contribute to and share one master database of vendor data. Organize your key contacts, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, web sites and other important vendor information by updating and using the Vendor profiles in ClientBase.
  
• The Corporate Sales/Account Executive can use ClientBase to develop a relationship with potential new clients by:
  1. Tracking contacts with potential customers
  2. Creating a process to track initial contact
  3. Setting up Reminders to track future contact
  4. Adding Remarks for agents in case the potential customer calls
  5. Creating set templates for Letters and E-mails
  6. Creating history of complaints and resolutions for permanent history
  7. Adding attachments of letters written to or on behalf of the account
  8. Creating a Res Card and using Batched Reminders to manage the process. Then using the Res Card Manager to perform pertinent queries or create saved Queries based on Res Card fields, i.e., Status.

If you have any further ideas on how you use ClientBase for your corporate clients or how you would like to use ClientBase for your corporate clients please e-mail me at sharon@trams.com with your input.