TripActions streamlines travel, communication, and reporting for dotdigital
dotdigital is a London-based marketing automation company that helps companies deliver personalised campaigns through an omnichannel approach. With employees across the globe, dotdigital needed a scalable, easy-to-use travel management company (TMC) to support the needs of their ever-growing team. In implementing TripActions, dotdigital has benefited from the flexibility of self service through the user-friendly platform, simplified bookings and itinerary changes with real-time answers to user queries, and increased employee adherence to the company’s travel expense policies.
Challenges
- •Inefficient communication between former TMC and travellers
- •Hassle of manual bookings and approvals
- •Lack of real-time support for last minute changes and reservations
- •Difficulty enforcing price or class policies for trips and stays
Results with TripActions
- •World-class UI makes booking a breeze
- •Round-the-clock travel agents provide answers within minutes
- •Simplified travel-spend management and reporting
- •£70,000 saved on hotels alone
dotdigital Needed a Scalable Way to Support Extensive International Travel
Managing travel through an agency when you're small is feasible, but with more than 340 employees scattered around the world, dotdigital had outgrown their local travel agency. “The fact that we’re growing rapidly, globally, means we needed a platform that’s scalable,” said Paraag Amin, CFO of dotdigital.
dotdigital had two office managers liaising with the travel agency to manually handle bookings. But as the company continued to grow, so did their share of time devoted to travel management. “It was 60-70% of what they were doing,” said Amin.
Enforcing travel and expense policies was challenging, too. Because of the manual booking process, sometimes the travel agency would provide options outside of the price or class policy, “without the person who’s booking knowing that was the case. And once it’s booked, it’s booked. There was no simple way of enforcing the policy,” said Amin.
Reporting was Cumbersome and Visibility was a Challenge
The fragmented nature of dotditigal’s previous travel management meant reporting was a hassle. “When it’s not in a system, it’s very much an invoice that gets sent manually to the finance team,” Amin observed. “When you’re receiving hundreds of invoices a month, for every hotel, flight, and train booking, it’s more and more manual work.”
And there was no clear way to know exactly who was where and when. “There was no visibility platform,” said Amin.
TripActions Simplified Booking and Provided Much Needed Duty of Care
For dotdigital, arranging travel with their former TMC was inefficient and unscalable. Office managers were relaying information between the traveller and the TMC, and dotdigital lacked flexible, self-managed bookings and timely responses to user queries. According to Amin,“When the user’s in control, and you’re getting real-time responses, it makes it much better.”
Given current global events, duty of care was another important consideration. dotdigital’s old TMC made it difficult to locate active travellers, as everything was manually booked. Now it has real-time visibility into travellers’ locations with TripActions Live Maps. “We’ve had incidents all over the world, so knowing where people are ticked a lot of boxes,” said Amin.
TripActions just kind of understood the problems that a business of our size would have.
- Paraag Amin, CFO, dotdigital
dotdigital Chose TripActions for Its User Experience & Outstanding Service
dotdigital knew it wanted a comprehensive solution or it would be on the hook to create a piecemeal one of its own, which Amin observed would be “just painful.” But the solution had to be user-friendly with real-time, 24x7 365 travel agent support for dotdigital’s global workforce to embrace it.
Considering the extensive travel of their international workforce, dotdigital couldn’t afford a months-long implementation process. “Implementing TripActions was simple,” said Amin. “It probably took three calls and a meeting.”
In the end it was the personalised care and clean UI that sold dotdigital on TripActions. “The level of contact from initial point to decision was substantially more than the competitors,” said Amin. “When you have that relationship with the senior level, it helps.”
See TripActions in action
See why more than 8,000 customers choose TripActions to modernize their Travel and Expense program.