Travelers at Epic were not happy. That grated upon travel operations manager Erin McWilliams when she joined the travel team in February 2017, which makes sense considering she had worked in HR for Epic for six years prior.
Much of the electronic healthcare record company's travel is project based and 80 percent is billed back to clients, so Epic controls travel costs in honor of fiduciary responsibility and client contracts. It does so via a team of 24/7/365 in-house counselors who arrange all the company's travel. McWilliams described the workflow, or at least the effect on travelers, as chaotic. An arranger would receive a trip request, put the trip together and move on to the next trip in the queue. "They would come to work and did not know what they would be working on that day," she said. The fragmented workflow meant that "every single time a traveler was going to book a trip, they would get a different answer." Travelers had no voice, no recourse. Travel schedules were impacting frequent travelers' abilities even to mow their lawns, McWilliams said, noting that the workflow created a dynamic in which travelers did not trust travel counselors. "There was just a lot of unhappiness and tension."
McWilliams mitigated that friction by deploying the in-house travel counselors in a different way. Now, under the Traveler BFF (best friend forever) program, Epic assigns a traveler to a dedicated agent who gets to know each traveler and delivers advice and itineraries that take specific travel needs, pain points and budgetary restraints into consideration. These besties book lowest logical fares while providing consistency, empathy and proactive help, anticipating travelers' needs.
The initiative began with five travelers in March 2017. "The feedback started pouring in about how wonderful it was to know that we could be more proactive," McWilliams said. The program now incorporates 113 travelers. "The relationships that have come from this ... just very simplistic approach to matching is incredible." Replacing "relationships of distrust" are friendships in which travelers often bring souvenirs back to their BFF counselors.
The high-touch service isn't driving up costs, either. In fact, the company's U.S.-booked air volume dropped 9.9 percent from 2017 to 2018, and a similar drop is expected for this year.
To ensure travelers continue to have a voice, McWilliams now works with Epic's travel management company, Fox World Travel, to conduct journey mapping. These conversations produce insights into travelers' recurring needs. "We have to continue to review and make new changes to how we treat the program, bring more empathy to the conversation. ... From the start of the journey, the moment that you know you're going to be assigned to a customer, essentially, through the time that you get home from that particular trip or the first particular trip, where are your pain points along the way?"
The feedback can extend beyond the travel team. In fact, the accounting department joined the conversation, and as a result, Epic released a homegrown expense tool last year that reimburses employees almost immediately. And so the journey continues.