Airline Widens Its Customer ViewAirline Widens Its Customer View

Hawaiian Airlines, one of the nation's top transporters of passengers between the U.S. mainland and the Hawaiian Islands, is counting on a software service to make its business-to-business relationships more effective. The hosted customer-relationship-management service from Salesforce.com Inc. will give sales, service, and marketing managers complete views of the airline's relationships with customers such as travel agencies, corporate travel departments, and ticket wholesalers.

Having a broad view of how business partners book tickets will free managers from having to coordinate and analyze information from the various sales channels, says Gordon Locke, Hawaiian's senior VP of marketing and sales. "I want people to spend less time in meetings and administering sales efforts, and more time selling," he says.

Until now, relationships with business partners have been managed as separate accounts, depending on how they booked tickets. If a travel agency booked tickets on Hawaiian through both a global distribution system, such as Sabre or Galileo, and also through Hawaiian's Web site, that wasn't apparent unless managers manually evaluated the data. Because the Salesforce software aggregates that information in one view, sales and service managers can now offer their business customers volume deals based on total purchases through the various channels.

"If we don't have a good relationship with a travel agency, they may book you on another airline," Locke says. "As we enhance our view of every customer relationship and consistently apply good sales practices and great information about that customer, we should have a competitive advantage in the industry."

Hawaiian is making the Salesforce service available to 45 managers and plans to extend the rollout to 100 managers.