APR team paves the way for a better customer e-reimbursement experience

Improvements to the campus’ e-reimbursement system should ease the process of creating and approving travel expense reports.

The Administrative Process Redesign project’s Traveler e-Reimbursement Team has worked for the past year to improve the system’s customer experience. 

On Wednesday, June 6, the team rolls out the first phase of its solutions, which include a multitude of small but impactful changes to the e-reimbursement interface.

In its effort to reduce user frustration with the system, the team has also simplified the language in many of the travel policies and procedures making them more concise and easier to understand.  

Vice Chancellor for Administration Darrell Bazzell praised the APR team for continuing to find solutions to make the system more user-friendly. He noted that the team’s effort to work directly with customers to get their feedback and suggestions for improvement was key to the project.

“An efficient and easy-to-use system for travel reimbursement is an important tool for us to have,” Bazzell says. “By improving this system for the many users on campus, the team has truly met APR’s mission of providing better administrative practices to UW–Madison.”

Some highlights of the changes scheduled for implementation are:

• Several fields will be renamed to correspond with the data intended for that field, increasing the likelihood that the required information is submitted correctly the first time.
• Beginning July 2, users will notice new and consolidated expense types. Besides reducing the number, many expense types have been retitled to be more intuitive to users.
• A number of travel policies and procedures including travel expense reimbursement policies have been rewritten and are now shorter and more clearly express the intent of the policy.
• A “Trip Planning Guide” will provide travelers with the information they need to know prior to booking their travel, including information about receipts, which are required for reimbursement, and which specific expenses are reimbursable.

The team is also working on a second phase of improvements, including a “smart” wizard-based tool that will guide travelers through the process of creating expense reports. The team envisions a new user-friendly interface that first asks travelers for basic information and then differentiates their needs accordingly, only asking for additional data if it is relevant to their specific travel event.

Early testing of the new changes showed that the percentage of submitted expense reports requiring subsequent revisions by the submitter has already been reduced by almost one-third.

For more information about the work of the APR Traveler e-Reimbursement team, visit www.vc.wisc.edu/apr

Campus feedback regarding the new improvements to the travel expense reimbursement process is welcomed at uwtravel@bussvc.wisc.edu