Gelco, Concur Expand Expense Language Options
Gelco Expense Management and Concur Technologies are boosting language capabilities for their expense reporting tools, underscoring client demand for expense systems to function on a broader international scope. Gelco last month enabled corporate clients to file, review and report on expenses in 10 additional languages, bringing the total number to 13. Concur Technologies this summer will enable expenses to be filed in Polish and French Canadian and in the fall will add "other Eastern European" languages to its roster, ultimately totaling about one dozen. Both vendors said the additions were driven by customer demand as international expense deployments continue. Concur said more than one-quarter of its roughly 1,700 users have deployed the expense system outside of the United States. Gelco said about 250 clients currently use its system across 35 countries. "With offices spread throughout the world, we needed a paperless expense management solution that could be fine-tuned with the appropriate set of rules and corporate policies for each region in which our employees conduct business," said Jo-Achim Hamburger, global travel manager at Stockholm-based Electrolux, which uses Concur Technologies. Concur said it can operate in English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Spanish and Portuguese. Gelco now enables Chinese, English, German, Italian, Kanji and several dialects of French, Portuguese and Spanish.
Outtask Expands Customer Service Offering
Online booking and expense management provider Outtask Inc. will partner with Parature, a provider of on-demand support software, to enhance its customer service offerings. Outtask previously had resolved support issues and inquiries through online chat, e-mails and phone calls and through its relationship with Parature, and has added a more comprehensive customer service portal. "Up until now, we've had a technology in place specifically for customer service, but we saw that we had more channels today that we're servicing people through, so we possibly needed a different technology to service all of those channels," said Ross Atkinson, chief marketing officer for Outtask. "We did not have the portal, but we had all those other channels and they were much more laborious." Through Parature's customer support portal, Outtask users can access personalized product information, including status and history of open service tickets on a 24/7 basis.
Hilton Garden Inn Selling Cell Phone Chargers
Hilton Garden Inn last month announced that its Pantry retail outlets have begun to stock cell phone chargers for purchase. Hilton Garden Inn, which is part of Hilton Hotels Corp., last fall determined through customer research that chargers were the business-related item travelers were most likely to leave behind. "Business travelers told us they depended on cell phones to be productive while on the road and that forgetting the cell phone charger was a major frustration," said vice president of marketing Mark Nogal.