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Executive for American Express in Tampa answers the call of China

By KRIS HUNDLEY
Published October 14, 2005

Larry Sax, an American Express executive in Tampa, recently got a preview of his next job during a 7 a.m. conference call.

"There were people on the call from Phoenix, where it was 4 a.m., Paris, where it was 3 p.m., Shanghai, where it was 7 p.m. and Sydney, where it was 9 p.m.," said Sax, who runs the company's business travel call center in Tampa. "I thought, "This is my new world.' "

Sax's life is about to change dramatically because he has been promoted to head American Express' fast-growing corporate travel business in China. Starting Oct. 24, he will supervise inbound call centers in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou with about 600 employees.

Since January, Sax has been a director in Tampa, overseeing about 500 corporate travel consultants. Before that, he headed American Express' consumer travel call center in Jacksonville.

American Express is not outsourcing customers' calls to China. The booming business there is all about servicing multinational corporations with executives based in the country and trying to build relationships with increasingly global Chinese companies.

On his last day in the Tampa office, Sax, 41, talked about the challenges ahead in China, where e-tickets are a rarity and many travel agents have never been on a plane. Sax, who has been with American Express for 15 years, also talked about his personal ties to the country. His wife lived there in the 1980s and is fluent in Mandarin; and in 2000, the couple adopted their older daughter in China. They have since had a second child, now 3.

"What a treat this will be for my wife, my kids and me," said Sax, whose family will live in Shanghai. "My contract is for four years, but I'm already thinking, "Wow, can I do another four years?' "

How does the work force in Tampa compare to the employees you will supervise in China?

The average age in Tampa is late 30s, and it's probably 60 percent female and 40 percent male. We have a couple of retirements every month.

In China, the work force is 85 percent female and averages about 24 years old. A lot of these workers have gone from home to university to the workplace and most of them live at home with their parents.

We're going to take workers out to the airports and get them on airplanes - some are seeing planes for the first time. We're also going to take them to our preferred hotel partners so they can experience what our customers are doing. These workers are dealing with experienced travelers who are 10 to 15 years older than they are.

Do your Chinese workers speak English?

All our travel counselors speak varying degrees of English, but most of the transactions take place in Chinese. Normally our corporate client will have an assistant who is Chinese call in and make the reservations.

I've arranged for a student to teach me Mandarin, to demonstrate I'm not just there for the short term. My wife has taught me a bit of Chinese, but it's limited.

I also want to bring in an English language instructor for anyone in the company who wants to improve their English skills. Some people are awesome (in their English-speaking skills) and some are mediocre. I really see that in the next four or five years, two languages will need to be spoken in business: Mandarin and English.

What's the biggest difference between the corporate travel business in China versus the rest of the world?

Everything there is still paper ticket, with all the processing and reconciliation that goes along with that. So you still have a large back-office operation in China today that you don't see in the U.S.

The mandate is for everyone in China to move to e-tickets by 2007, so that gathering of data will be automated. But right now, the travel agent in China operates off four computer platforms and they constantly have to bring information back and forth.

We live in a plastic economy, where everything is credit card. China is a cash-based economy. And the concept of introducing plastic and reporting (data) off of plastic is very new to Chinese companies.

How do you plan to expand your China business?

We're focusing on the domestic market with Chinese companies - that's a $3.7-billion market - as well as further developing the international companies who operate joint ventures in China. We also want to speed up the pace of technology and automation with online booking tools. We can grow, but not at such a fast rate. More of the work will be done by automated processes.

What are the personnel challenges in such a fast-growth business?

Developing and keeping Chinese nationals who are great leaders. People are being moved through the chain so quickly, it's a matter of giving them time to learn and develop. And there's a lot of poaching of top leadership (by competitors).

In Shanghai and Beijing we do a good job of (finding) entry-level people, because people want to come to a Fortune 100 company. But when you go to Guangzhou, the mentality there is that people want to create their own businesses.

You've made numerous trips to China. What stands out as most distinctive about the culture?

When they held a Family Day at the American Express Travel offices in China, people brought in their parents. The managers walked around, thanking the parents for having their children work for us.

Here, when we have Family Day, people bring their spouses and kids. And in Tampa, when I asked a group of about 15 people, not one of us had parents in Tampa.

The other thing that strikes me about China is that the rate of change is so quick. It's staggering. We've never seen anything like this in the U.S.

But is the business traveler's need any different in China than in the U.S.?

No. It's the same thing, just a different language.

Kris Hundley can be reached at hundley@sptimes.com or 727 892-2996.

[Last modified October 14, 2005, 01:40:20]