How to bring a care-led approach to your RFP process

This is our third blog dedicated to exploring the RFP process and helping you get prepared. Having previously explored the pre-work needed before going to RFP and how to assess a supplier’s portfolio, we’re now diving into the deep end: How to bring a care-led approach to your RFP process.

So, let’s start at the very beginning. What exactly do we mean by care-led strategy when it comes to your business travel programme?

At Travel Counsellors for Business, a care-led approach means considering the needs and drivers of the individual. This approach inspires your travellers, giving them the confidence to have meaningful travel experiences, knowing we've got their back. 

In the context of an RFP, ensuring that a traveller-centric, personalised approach is at the core of the supplier’s value proposition is crucial to being able to implement that culture in your own programme.

In this blog, we'll cover how to:

• Assess whether your strategy is led by care, cost, or customer
• Identify the gaps in the traditional RFP process
• Integrate a care-led approach into the RFP process
• Evaluate TMC fit and culture

Do you have a care-led strategy?

Understanding the key driver behind your travel strategy is crucial to ensuring the RFP process delivers a supplier partner who can meet your goals. At Travel Counsellors for Business, we divide strategic approaches into three core areas: cost, customer, and care.

Each approach has its pros and cons. You'll be drawn to different approaches, often influenced by the overall strategic direction and culture of the organisation you work within. But, understanding your strategic direction, and ensuring overall alignment with the business, is crucial to selecting a TMC partner with whom you can build a long-term, successful partnership. 

If you already know you have a care-led programme – great! But if you’re still struggling to identify quite where your priorities lie, and how to define that, then try our handy Business Travel Barometer to qualify if your programme is currently cost, customer or care-centric. 

Understanding the RFP Process

Traditionally, the RFP process places emphasis on cost, technology, and service level agreements. Recently, data has come to the fore as a key consideration, with a growing focus on data consolidation, processing, and capture to enable businesses to truly understand their travellers.

All of these areas are measurable and often come with significant evidence through which the person running the RFP can measure suitability.

What the process often omits though, is care.

Not duty of care, but the care-led approach of considering the needs and drivers of the individual traveller, traveller booker, and all associated stakeholders.

The current RFP process doesn’t always account for non-tangible aspects such as care and culture, values and goals, to be demonstrated. But, the need to include questions of this nature is essential if you're leading with a care-centric strategy and require a supplier who's willing and able to help you fulfil that.

How to integrate a care-led approach into the RFP process

Once you've defined what a care-led approach entails for you, and have a clear idea of what this means in practice, you can start to shape your questioning to enable suppliers to demonstrate their capabilities in this area.

The questions we would expect to see in a care-centric RFP would revolve around the following:

• Personalised service: What does this mean to you? How do you demonstrate personalisation and looking after the individual, beyond segmentation in an online booking tool or placing travellers in pre-defined persona ‘boxes’?
• Care: How do you define care beyond duty? What does care mean to you within the context of business travel and how have you demonstrated this with your clients?
• Flexibility: What does a flexible service look like? What processes are in place to enhance flexibility and the ability to flex to travellers’ individual needs?

Clearly defining the areas of importance in your programme, and then creating questions to interrogate a supplier’s ability to support these areas, is a key way to ensure your care-led approach is successfully integrated into the RFP process.

Evaluating the TMC culture and fit

In the exact same way that understanding your strategic approach allows you to ask the right questions, knowing your company values is essential when it comes to evaluating cultural fit.

Care needs to become culture to enable a care-centric travel strategy to thrive. Being able to assess and evaluate a supplier’s culture in relation to care will help you to see how aligned, or not, they are to your vision and values.

One technique to achieve this is a scorecard approach. This technique is used in standard RFPs, but is even more necessary here when you will have both qualitative and quantitative factors to evaluate. Creating a scorecard with a clear points system will keep the process, fair, measured, and accurate. It will also help to prevent distractions.

Building this out can be tough in isolation, especially when you're close to the project. Involving key stakeholders, such as HR, finance and the travel bookers themselves, will help to keep you on track with your organisational values. It will also bring different perspectives and weightings to aspects of the RFP, which could highlight anything you have overlooked or placed more value on than the rest of the organisation.

In conclusion, care-led strategies are not yet standard in RFPs. There is still some conflict of opinion on what care means within business travel. Coupled with a traditional focus on cost savings and technology offerings, care can often be pushed down the priorities – or even off the checklist altogether.

If a care-centric approach is important to you and your programme, knowing this and being able to articulate the attributes you value is crucial before commencing the RFP process. It will bring you both clarity and focus, knowing what to look for in the vast sea of suppliers who will be vying for your business.

And whilst it might take a few iterations to get right, the benefits of including care-led questioning in the RFP ultimately mean more alignment and a deeper understanding of the cultural fit between your business and your TMC.