Redefining Success
Instead of average call/handling times (which get shorter with AI assistance but longer when calls are of a more complicated nature) or the number of transactions processed, buyers and TMCs said the more relevant ways to measure agent performance were customer satisfaction scores, sentiment metrics and first-contact resolution ratios.
“Drive it down to actual customer sentiment,” Casto said. “That would change the way that the game is played. People will say that they do those kinds of things. Not really. The vast majority of the revenue isn’t tied to customer satisfaction.”
Marc Casto, MVC Solutions CEO
Casto put some blame on corporate travel managers. Complaining about inferior service is one thing, “but if you’re not defining the service in a way that’s relevant to the traveler, you’re measuring the wrong thing,” he said. “Is this personalized? Do they understand me? Are they doing this proactively? We’re using an older methodology to deal with a modern problem. We’ve moved from transactional to value-based, but the way that we measure it is still based around what’s on your call center stack.”
Several TMC leaders said that was changing, and mentioned the use of CSAT and NPS.
According to Kernoghan, bookings processed, call volumes and revenue per consultant “still matter, but they are no longer the full picture. Today, we are looking at performance more broadly, with a stronger focus on client outcomes, including satisfaction, policy compliance and overall service delivery.”
BCD’s Green is “on a bandwagon” to reorient service evaluation. “Success of a program isn’t answering 80 percent of the calls in 20 seconds,” she said. “Let’s look at what our CSAT scores are. Let’s look at where a traveler fell out of automation. Let’s look at making sure we have a hotel, a car and an air reservation. Let’s start looking at different ways to measure success. We’re going to evolve that over the next few months, and into next year.”
Direct Travel plans to capture advisor sentiment starting in the fall to measure confidence levels, Sikes said.
At Navan, agents are “incentivized solely on customer satisfaction,” said Kyle Keating, enterprise solutions architect at Navan, during an April 2025 Utah Business Travel Association event, according to a recap posted by CBT. “We also design agent platforms that don’t require knowing legacy GDS systems because Gen Z isn’t going to learn Sabre Red.”
CBT tracks call handling time to inform its staffing decisions, “but we don’t hold people accountable to trying to get off the phone in a certain amount of time,” Cameron said. “That is completely against a service-first mentality.”