A business trip can be broken down into three stages: preparation (booking and managing any administrative constraints), the trip itself, and the return (entering expense claims).
The traveller’s experience therefore begins during the trip preparation and ends when the expenses are actually reimbursed.
A business trip requires time for preparation and execution, and can be a source of anxiety for travellers.
Why Improve the Customer Experience?
Improving the customer experience is becoming essential, and for good reason:
- Business travel and expense accounts are almost always seen as a burden. It is therefore important to minimize their impact on employees. This is especially crucial in sectors where recruiting and retaining employees is challenging; anything that can enhance attractiveness should be considered.
- With the growth of teleworking and mobile workers, more employees are swapping short daily commutes for longer weekly or fortnightly trips. These extended journeys significantly impact employees’ private lives and well-being.
- When travel is seamless, employees don’t need to seek support, saving time and reducing stress.
Offering quality business travel impacts:
- The attractiveness of the company
- The well-being and loyalty of employees
- Employee productivity
How to Improve?
The first step is to identify the pain points. The most common include:
- Difficulty booking services:
- Offer not available (e.g., a specific hotel that does not comply with the company’s travel policy or is not available in the hotel program).
- Problem connecting to the booking tool (and no one to help).
- Validation issues (approver is absent).
- Difficulty modifying or cancelling reservations:
- Needing to contact the travel agency by phone and enduring long wait times.
- Lack of information in case of supplier changes/delays during the journey:
- Not receiving notifications about flight delays.
- Tedious entry of expense reports:
- Entering expense reports takes too much time.
- Missing proof or information, lengthening the processing time.
- Long reimbursement periods.
Solutions to Address Pain Points
Resolving booking difficulties:
- Work on the offer: Ensure the hotel program is comprehensive and includes hotels near frequent meeting locations. Review city caps to reflect current realities, ideally once or twice a year.
- Ensure accessibility: Make sure everyone knows how to connect to booking tools (PC and mobile) and provide clear instructions for issues like forgotten passwords (see our article on developing an efficient support strategy).
- Simplify validation workflows: Avoid overly complex multi-level validation processes. Implement a single level of validation with the option to transfer to a second validator if necessary.
- Resolving modification/cancellation difficulties:
- Increase traveller autonomy by allowing modifications via mobile apps. If not possible, simplify the process with the travel agency, such as implementing a chat feature instead of a phone help desk.
- Providing information on supplier changes/delays:
- Ensure employees have the right tools (e.g., apps) to receive notifications from suppliers.
- Facilitating expense report entry:
- Utilize OCR (Optical Character Recognition) on mobile versions to save time by pre-filling expense fields.
- Reducing reimbursement periods:
- Plan weekly payment campaigns for quicker reimbursement.
Efficient Support Chain
If business travellers still face difficulties, an efficient and responsive support chain will help address issues quickly, preventing escalation and ensuring traveller satisfaction.
Don’t hesitate to contact our experts for any questions on improving your support chain.
Laure de la Lande, Axys Odyssey