In a consumerization-focused and progressively millennial-dominated era, employees need to feel as empowered in their professional lives as they do in their personal lives.
Today, every business is focusing on improving its customer experience. However, without great employee experience, companies won’t be able to serve their customers in the best possible manner. The trend is changing now and companies have started focusing on employees equally. Indian enterprises are moving towards the era of automation to improve on job experience of employees which leads to increased employee satisfaction and ultimately greater customer loyalty. One big example of automation is the provision of an expense management solution to employees which removes the hassles of tedious reimbursement processes.
In a consumerization-focused and progressively millennial-dominated era, employees need to feel as empowered in their professional lives as they do in their personal lives. Ignoring this fact will only result in inevitable employee disinterest, frustration, and churn. Moreover, traveler-focussed user experience is central to ensuring a successful travel program. It all starts with a strong employee focus and a very real interest in saving them the agony of chasing processes that are merely meant to support their core responsibilities. This makes expense management system central to an organization ’s business activity.
Companies which have deployed expense management solutions are not only able to improve employee productivity but are also able to save a good amount of money. A rough estimate suggests that most Indian enterprises lose around 5% of their revenue to employee frauds. Companies have started to take note of this now! Properly managed, employee expenses are considered the second most controllable expense after payroll and benefits. But still, Indian organizations have struggled to impose control over this significant cost centre.
It’s even more inconvenient for employees when it comes to spending their own money while on a business trip or doing purchase for official purpose. Whether they’re buying a plane ticket for a business trip, ordering food for a company meeting or handling any other expenses, employees sometimes have to use into their own personal money. Only a handful number of companies offer advances to their employees to incur cost on behalf of the company. After spending their own money for official work, employees even have to go through the hassle of manually filing of expenses and then wait for reimbursement to get cleared, with employees of 50% companies’ having no visibility into approval cycle.
Even the Finance department of 65% organizations still verifies expenses & does data crunching manually, which delays the entire reimbursement process. Manual processing of bills is fairly tedious for Enterprises with a large mobile workforce. The dependency on paper vouchers does not only curtail employee productivity, but it also impacts the functioning and the performance of the finance department too. All this collectively leads to job dissatisfaction and also impacts the productivity of the employee.
To give a sense of urgency of the situation our survey found that 43% of companies with manual or partial automation want to opt for full automation in six months. Companies want fully automated tools to help enhance productivity and overcome roadblocks in their day-to-day work. The only way to achieve a change in this is to make the entire process of expense filling easy and technologically advanced, in short, provide a simple-to-use system that automatically imposes corporate rules and minimizes the effort required by employees.
Some of the successful Indian enterprises which are known for their culture and employee focus have adopted AI-powered expense management solutions. These kinds of solutions also come with corporate cards where employees can be provided with advance money. The bills of daily allowances and other expenses get automatically captured in the dashboard. This industry-leading automation helps not only makes processing expenses easier and faster but also creates a workforce which is more productive and engaged. With a digital & automated T&E platform in place, companies can gain 100% spend visibility and control, speed up their process cycle time by 7X, reduce paperwork by 96%, reduce leakage by more than 90%.
In this digital era, businesses cannot afford to waste money on an outdated paper-based system that leaves it open to fraud and fails to deliver the required real-time cash flow visibility. With the usage of these AI-based expense management solutions, companies are making day-to-day lives easy for employees. This will automatically increase their productivity and efficiency. Both employees and employers have control over expenses and transparency throughout the process. In short, taking the initiative to invest in AI-based expense management solutions is something that can drastically improve employee experience, especially that of today’s millennials.
Article Credit: People Matters