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Case Study: Crisis Recovery

One of the world’s largest non-profit relief organizations turned to Working Solutions for help in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

The Challenge

Ordinary neighborhoods and hundreds of miles of coastline were turned to piles of debris when Hurricane Katrina hit the U.S. Gulf Coast. While the storm still raged, a major relief organization geared up to transport thousands of emergency workers and volunteers into the devastated region. They turned to their usual travel management company to handle the travel arrangements.

While dedicated to the task, it became immediately apparent that the travel company’s normal travel specialist capacity could not provide the sheer numbers and flexibility required to respond to the crisis. Urgently needing to transport armies of relief staff and volunteers into the devastated area, they called on Working Solutions to provide prepared specialists on an expedited basis.

With an exponential increase in demand, the immediate need was to:

• Rapidly build and deploy a large pool of travel specialists
• Ensure all specialists were experienced in SABRE and Native SABRE
• Select travel professionals who could work extended hours under pressure

These remote travel specialists would also be required to fit seamlessly with the travel company’s existing specialists and processes without requiring a lot of training time. Most importantly, all this needed to be achieved under the spotlight of international media attention and public opinion.

The Solution

We are very impressed with Working Solutions’ responsiveness, flexibility, and quality. The expedited service they were able to provide was crucial to ensuring staff and volunteers were in place to provide safe shelter, food, medical supplies and comfort in the aftermath of Katrina. Vice President of Mid-Atlantic Affairs, Travel Management Co.

Working Solutions pulled together a skilled account services team specializing in crisis response and recovery to formulate an effective plan. The team knew they had to address a number of issues including:

• Securing agents with specialized skills
• Ensuring rapid call response
• Meeting high call volume and volume fluctuations
• Monitoring and maintaining quality levels
• Controlling the costs faced by the relief organization

An additional requirement was to ensure that all aspects of the program complied with state and federal security requirements.

Within a matter of hours, the account services team launched Working Solutions’ Agents OnDemand program, leveraging a remote specialist community of more than 76,000 experienced professionals.

Given the urgency to rapidly implement the project and begin ramp up, project managers carefully identified and selected experienced travel specialist professionals with existing SABRE skills to reduce preparation time by 37%, allowing the travel specialists to be on the phone assisting relief workers within 72 hours of being contacted.

The Result

With Working Solutions, the relief organization had continuous access to travel assistance without requiring their usual travel management company to change its office hours, pay overtime or add additional headcount.

By partnering with Working Solutions to formulate an effective business continuity solution to help all parties involved respond to the crisis, the travel management company was able to maintain an uninterrupted flow in business operations and meet its obligations to the relief organization without neglecting other customers. This was a critical link to ensure that the thousands of coastal residents displaced by Hurricane Katrina receive the assistance they needed as quickly as possible.

In a crisis situation, Working Solutions provided the scheduling flexibility and increased manpower needed to meet the challenge.

The following year, concern over travel arrangements during the hurricane season led the relief organization to request that Working Solutions maintain a team of agents on emergency standby status. Fortunately, there was no need to activate those agents, but the organization knew they could rely on Agents OnDemand if the need were to arise.