TBR Global Chauffeuring takes Executive of the Year for Transportation at SBR Management Excellence Awards 2019

Managing Director, Asia Pacific Michael Chiay established an innovative and commercially oriented team in Asia Pacific.

Early in 2019, Michael Chiay faced the challenge of leading TBR Global Chauffeuring’s Asia-Pacific operations. His responsibilities included building the company’s remit and scale across the region.

In a relatively short period, he has established an innovative and commercially oriented team based in Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Tokyo.
Now driving strategic growth across the region and worldwide, Mr Chiay banked on over 20 years of experience in logistics planning, experiential marketing and digital creative work, and corporate meetings and events, as well as his global leadership roles in several successful organisations.

When TBR launched its Hong Kong office in 2011, the 28-year-old Scottish company aimed to seize the growing demand for ground transportation solutions to support the corporate travel, financial roadshow, and event markets in APAC, with the regional team set to drive the achievement of growth targets stipulated in the company’s “Road to 2021” strategy.

As Managing Director for Asia Pacific, Mr Chiay focused on setting up a team that would deliver high-quality customer service for the events business. He aimed to streamline the company’s approaches to business communication, customer service optimisation, and problem solving.

As a result, the events service grew significantly, becoming one of TBR’s fastest-growing revenue streams and accounting for 20% of total regional revenue. The impressive increase in business travel resulted in solid business growth across APAC, due to Mr Chiay’s vision and dedication.

His specific achievements include clarifying the organisational structure between departments and from the customer’s perspective; empowering the staff to effectively understand how their purpose and responsibilities affect the entire organisation; and defining the customer experience to determine the processes and changes needed to optimise TBR’s services.

Consequently, job error rates were reduced by 50%, employee engagement increased one-fold, resolution time of customer-generated issues decreased by 50%, customer retention was raised to 100%, and management time was increased for high-leverage work.

In addition to having these accomplishments, Mr Chiay led the planned and executive-sponsored migration of control function roles from the APAC offices to the Dubai Shared Services Centre. This move resulted in a team redesign to specialise in revenue-generating and client-facing functions; reduction of office staffing costs by 25%; improvement of client response time from 2 hours to 1 hour; and the exponential growth of business scalability alongside control support functions regionwide.

Furthermore, to transform TBR into a commercial-led organisation, Mr Chiay planned and implemented a sales-enablement structure in APAC, which involved defining a sales process that is unique to TBR’s three service lines (corporate, roadshows, and events), whilst building up skills development, content, and technology to support the sales infrastructure.

As a result, the onboarding programme for new sales team members was reduced from 5 to 3 working days; their ramp-up period was shortened from 3 months to 1 month on average; sales dashboards were created to enable efficient performance measurement against benchmarks, identify gaps and opportunities, and prepare plans.
Owing to these improvements, the company achieved 33% conversion rate and more than 90% accuracy in revenue forecasting.

Under Mr Chiay’s leadership, TBR’s long-term stability is expected to be sustained as the company pursues new growth opportunities in the dynamic APAC market.

The Singapore Business Review Management Excellence Awards was held on 26 November 2019 at the Conrad Centennial Singapore.

The 2019 nominees were judged by a panel consisting of Henry Tan, Group CEO & Chief Innovation Officer at NEXIA TS; David Chew, Executive Director, Risk Advisory at Deloitte Southeast Asia; Lim Wei Wei, Partner and Practice Leader, Governance and Risk at Baker Tilly TFW; Pardeep Singh Khosa, Director of Dispute Resolution at Drew & Napier; and Yang Eu Jin, Partner and Co Head of Capital Markets Practice at RHTLaw Taylor Wessing LLP.

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