“At Branch, our biggest value is ‘customers first.’ We’re willing to — on the drop of a dime — hop on a plane and visit a customer if need be,” said Tae. “Trying to book on the fly was pretty difficult, simply because the overall experience wasn’t great. I dreaded taking trips not because of the customer but because our corporate travel booking tool was so difficult to use.”

While getting started was easy, Branch also saved a lot of time on the back-end. The Navan reconciliation tool saves hours during month-end close. Before, Kevin had to export the Branch credit card statement, CTRL+F into their employee list, and locate them manually. He said, “It would take me hours to find everyone’s department, location, and type it in. I tried to do everything I could think of to automate it, including writing my own scripts. The Navan reconciliation tool just does it so much faster.”

While people are sometimes needed to resolve complex problems from a service perspective, a travel program that requires human involvement at every step is antiquated and unscalable. For the overwhelming majority of simple bookings and processes, Navan enables employees at Branch to focus on items that truly require their attention.

“I think it’s obvious that whoever designed the foundation of the Navan platform really understood what business travel is like and what the major pain points are,” Kevin said. “It’s hard to make this kind of product without taking a step back and thinking through everything before you get started. Hats off for making a cohesive product and not leaving anything undone. It’s really polished. Just the fact that you don’t need to train anybody to use it speaks volumes.”