“THE BOT
CAN TAKE
A THOUSAND OR
A MILLION
TRANSACTIONS, IT
MAKES NO
DIFFERENCE.
THE SUPPORT TEAM
REMAINS
INVALUABLE [FOR
HIGH-LEVEL
TASKS].”
EY’S KAREN
HUTCHINGS
Robots, finding such processes can be a delicate challenge.
“While RPA can transform the economics and service lev-
el of current manual operations, we have seen as many as
30 to 50 percent of initial RPA projects fail,” EY reported. “This
isn’t a reflection of the technology; there are many successful
deployments, but there are some common mistakes that will
often prevent an organization from delivering on the promise
of RPA.”
Among those mistakes, according to EY, is attempting to use
bots to address overly complex problems. “Targeting RPA at
a highly complex process is a common mistake. This results
in significant automation costs, when that effort could have
been better spent automating multiple other processes.”
Another, according to EY, is attempting to entirely eliminate
the human element from the bot-enabled process, which ends
up in a significant automation effort, additional cost and little
additional benefit. While Hutchings’ robotics implementation
reduced the amount of human intervention required to support
advance bookings and achieve the consequent savings, this was
merely a slice of the work that the India-based support team
had on their plates. That said, every travel manager knows driv-
ing traveler behavior is time-intensive work.
“The bot can take a thousand or a million transactions. It
makes no difference,” Hutchings said, adding that the volume
efficiency gained from this single automation alone has freed
up valuable time that the support team can now spend solving
higher-level challenges that are too complex for a bot. “The
support team remains invaluable to the travel program, especially at the rate EY is growing and the number of travelers
that we have,” Hutchings said.
NEW SPOTS FOR BOTS
With the success of the initiative to increase meeting attendees’ advance purchases of airfares, Hutchings and her team
are looking for more opportunities for bots to prove their value. In March, she launched an effort to push hotel bookings
through designated TMCs by using a bot to locate those travelers who booked airfare through the TMC but did not book
their hotels that way.
“The bot is looking at the data and then sending an email to
the individual to ask them how they have booked their hotel or
why they have booked direct,” Hutchings said. After the email
is sent, Hutchings’ team can follow up directly with the travelers to remind them of the importance of proper hotel booking
for, among other reasons, duty of care.
Just weeks after the rollout of this bot, hotel booking chan-
nel compliance had increased by 5 percent, a figure Hutchings
said should improve with time. “We’ll get more results of this
later, when people have to book again,” she said. “They’re not
going to go direct. They are going to book through the agency.
This is something I think will take us six months to really see
the true benefit of that compliance piece.”
Hutchings also is exploring the possibility of deploying bots
around uploading meeting attendee information into EY’s
Cvent meetings management
tool. The process is a bit more
complex than typically han-
dled by a bot, but the manual
data entry required makes it
worthwhile to look into it.
IS A CHATBOT NEXT?
EY’s travel management team
is considering the introduction of a chatbot to handle
simple, frequently asked
questions by travelers who
contact EY’s travel help line,
such as offering TMC contact information. While it’s
a different technology from
advance bookings and attachment rates, Hutchings said
it’s all about productivity and
how EY’s travel team can best
respond to its travelers.
“The idea is that you de-
fine the frequently asked
questions that are going to
come in,” Hutchings said. “If
it’s a frequently asked ques-
tion, then the answer will
come back automatically. On
the internet, when you’re on
a chatbot and it says, ‘Please
wait a moment. I’m going to
find out for you,’ it means
they’re finding the next per-
son. And we also plan to set
up that feature, too, so we
can have our standard ques-
tions and then our team will
support the questions that
aren’t covered.”
The introduction of robot-
ic travel management pro-
cesses is uncharted territory
for Hutchings’ team, but the
initial success has fascinat-
ed them. “This makes it so
interesting for the team,”
Hutchings said. “I never
thought, four years ago, I’d
be talking about robotics,
but it’s great. Working with
new, innovative solutions
like this is another very in-
teresting part of our roles.”
