How To Consumerize The Enterprise

By now, everyone knows Uber is changing the game of corporate travel. Last year, the company found itself on the expense report more than traditional taxis did, and for the first time since T&E company Certify began tracking this data, Uber also surpassed rental cars in corporate travel spend.

The findings were released last week, and while Uber’s rise among business travelers is impressive, it’s no longer surprising. The same might be said for Airbnb and Lyft, too.

Certify CEO Bob Neveu discussed the research with PYMNTS and told us the other services that are likely to bring new disruption to corporate travel — and what they have to do to climb the ranks like Uber.

“In the ridesharing space, Uber has obviously had a huge impact, and they continue to dominate and gain market share and disrupt,” Neveu said. “As we looked into our data, we decided to specifically look for additional sharing economy services.”

In doing so, the executive explained, Certify wanted to look at what other consumer-facing services in the sharing economy and on-demand space were also gaining traction within the enterprise — what he described as the “consumerization of the enterprise.” It was part of broader analysis to answer an interesting question:

“Can a business traveler use consumer products to be successful in their business travel?” asked Neveu. “And what we’re seeing is that that is the case.”

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He highlighted a few of the apps that are up-and-coming among the corporate travel space.

WeWork, a service that provides on-demand work and meeting spaces, is a natural fit for the business traveler, Neveu said, as traveling professionals look to conduct their business somewhere other than a hotel room. But other, more consumer-facing services are entering the enterprise world, too.

HotelTonight, an app that allows consumers to book last-minute hotel rooms, is also surprisingly popular among business travelers, Neveu said. “What we’re seeing is that if it’s a last-minute business trip, travelers may have to skip over the internal corporate travel policy, but that’s OK, because it’s going to save the business money,” he explained. “We didn’t necessarily think we would see that being adopted in the business travel marketplace.”

On-demand food delivery services, like GrubHub and Postmates, are also meeting the demands of professionals. This category is gaining traction because it allows corporate travelers to access a whole slew of vendors but then pay and receive a receipt from a single source.

Is This Allowed?

Not every business can so seamlessly adopt these services, of course. For companies that travel a lot, corporate policy is more likely to remain stringent on the approved vendors with which employees can do business.

But a lot of firms, especially SMEs, simply allow the employee to make the decision on what service to use. These are the business customers that these service providers want to capture, but they still need to help employees follow business policy, Neveu explained.

“It’s all around approval, payment and receipt,” he said of the most important features that these apps must have if they are to gain traction with the corporate world.

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Regarding approval, Neveu predicted that many of these service companies are going to implement some kind of approval component into their apps that allow users to seamlessly get approved from their travel managers to use that vendor.

When it comes to payment, Neveu pointed to the recent recognition among corporations that a central payment card for all employees is not exactly the best way to manage and monitor employee spend. Instead, businesses today are gearing towards single-use, prepaid and virtual cards for individual workers. That means these sharing economy and on-demand apps must get on board.

“As long as these providers can allow people to say ‘use my personal card’ or ‘use my work credit card’ and allow users to have multiple profiles or multiple cards, I think that solves this situation really nicely,” he said. “It’s critical you have some type of centralized service so the user isn’t having to get cash or enter their payment card.”

And finally, among the biggest sources of friction for corporate travel is the receipt and the process of building the expense report. Neveu described this area as a “critical touch point;” the services that integrate their solutions into other expense management tools by automating the capture of receipt data into an expense report will differentiate the winners from the losers in corporate travel market share.

Convenience Over Cost

Whether it’s a hotel room on the fly or Chinese takeout for a late-night brainstorming session, Neveu explained that these services are all about convenience for business travelers, especially when cost is less of an issue.

“The key component, really, for successful disruption in that consumer-to-enterprise play is that it cannot be just about price,” he said. “If it’s just price alone, that’s a horrible differentiator, because at the end of the day, the employee says, ‘Well, that’s the company’s money.’”

Employees may want to save their businesses money but not at the cost of an unpleasant or inconvenient experience, he added.

“That convenience is critical for any of these sharing economy products to be successful,” Neveu continued. “And, I think, the ones that do a better job of that are continuing to have much more success in the business travel marketplace.”