We chat with Erica Antony, Chief Product Officer about CWT’s product strategy and how changing customer needs are influencing the road forward.
How has business travel technology changed over the last two years?
In short, the digital transformation of business travel has accelerated, and I see this in two parts:
- Evolving customer needs: Today customer needs give priority to safe, confident, and value-aligned travel. There is a growing expectation for easy and comfortable self-service, but also built-in intelligence and understanding of who you are and what you need - the ability to anticipate personal needs. Digital solutions focus on bringing everything to your fingertips, providing flexibility and content choice that is in line with personal preferences and values, and making more relevant, simplified decisions in an environment that could otherwise be overwhelming.
- Requirements for vendors to be more efficient and agile: Vendors have also been looking at ways to grow customer value through service excellence, while dealing with increased complexity in the ecosystem and ongoing pandemic-related resource challenges. Internal technology modernization and process automation became top priority to enable service scale and operational efficiency in a resource-constrained environment. At the same time, industry initiatives like NDC accelerated, continuing to raise the bar for quick and flexible integration across the travel ecosystem, supporting a more connected travel program and user journey.
Customer priorities have also changed through the pandemic. The importance and value of people have been amplified with travelers and travel managers now equally prioritizing employee wellbeing, living shared values, and ultimately ensuring a program and experience that balances business and employee needs. Travel has become more purposeful and aligned to company and employee value systems, particularly sustainability and wellbeing objectives. Technology solutions need to address traveler experience, while also incorporating tools to support corporate responsibility as part of the overall program performance – moving from the traditional return on investment (ROI) calculation to an overall assessment of value for investment.
What new solutions and enhancements can CWT clients expect to see?
A range of recently delivered and in-progress capabilities play a significant role in returning to travel with confidence. We introduced CWT Travel Essentials (providing COVID-19 guidelines) to specifically assist up-to-the-minute planning and updates for travelers on the road. Clients can also look forward to enhanced global service with CWT counselors now armed with a new customer experience (CX) platform. The platform delivers a real-time, single view of the traveler’s journey, including where they are in a trip, their travel policy and trip history, as well as their channel contacts, allowing for more dynamic customer conversations. In terms of getting help with a booking quickly, or assistance when on the move during a trip, messaging is now broadly available around the globe. Over 1000 clients have enabled this capability, helping their travelers get the service they need, when, where and how they want it.
Looking forward to 2022 and beyond, we have an incredibly exciting roadmap centered on building out the myCWT platform and enabling the end-to-end, omni-channel experience. We’re also helping clients calculate, reduce and offset their business travel carbon footprint towards sustainable business travel by enhancing self-service capabilities for travelers, and simplifying integration and connectivity across the travel ecosystem.
What are some of the long-term visions for product enhancements beyond 2022?
Our long-term vision is rooted in the values of B2B4E, serving equally the needs of businesses and their employees. Data and artificial intelligence will have a prominent role in this future state.
For businesses and travel managers, it’s making sure they have everything they need to manage their program effectively, especially when faced with continued change and volatility in systems, processes, costs, employee expectations and business objectives. Imagine travel program management that is self-tuning, flexes with business conditions and automatically measures and optimizes against value objectives.
For employees, it’s about enabling greater self-service and anticipating needs. Travelers will want to use the tools provided and stay in the program because the experience will draw them in. This experience will consider their personal preferences and behaviors to present only what is relevant, business-blessed recommendations, optimized for value, proactively offer assistance, and ultimately integrate all aspects of a journey.
