Senior Operations Manager, Travel Experience

At Navan, the Travel Experience (TE) Operations team works at the intersection of the most important issues facing the Travel Experience team. It is a small, well-rounded group, that works closely with senior leadership and cross functionally shaping and driving strategic, operational, and organizational improvements across the Travel Experience team, such as:

• Global Travel Experience strategy and implementation of change
• Being the critical interface with R&D (product, engineering) to ensure tech approach to self-serve and post booking travel support experience
• New business customer implementation and transition management
• Together with partner operations driving the true TMC delivery
• Driving customer insights to deliver improvements in quality, learning and product roadmap
• Ownership of support omni-channels and agent desktop to establish a world class agent and customer experience

In the Senior Operations Manager role, you’ll work directly with leadership on strategic identification and prioritization of opportunities that will ensure our full tech stack infrastructure for agents works excellent and the Travel Experience organization is represented in product and organization enhancement initiatives, this includes:

• Being the critical interface for the product feedback received by the operational teams in travel experience and owner of the process of triaging the right focus towards our R&D teams (product, engineering)
• Continuously building and improving our channel infrastructure to successfully deliver a state of the art support technology for the agent and customer experience
• Transforming our multi-system support tooling into a one view agent desktop and organize high adoption and functionality of the tool
• Context based routing setup and partner with the TE business directors and IT team to implement the best and most efficient strategy
• Partnering with the different product team stakeholders and change team on the operational impact of product- and travel content enhancements

Reporting to the Director of Travel Experience Operations, the Senior Operations Manager thrives in a high growth environment and easily adjusts to rapid changes in people, process, and product. You are very analytical, structured, and detail-oriented with a sharp focus on building scalable operations within complex cross-functional environments.

What You’ll Do

• Identifying and owning the core strategic projects - this includes identifying operational inefficiencies and implementing solutions to improve routing, product triage process, channel infrastructure and agent desktop
• Acting as a trusted partner for the Travel Experience senior leadership team. Being successful in the role you analyze, understand and deliver according to well defined objectives and executing according to a well defined plan. The role requires to be hyper focussed on delivering the key responsibilities, further developments are clearly planned and prioritized
• Identifying and managing the omni-channel infrastructure strategy. Focus on delivering efficiency, satisfaction and secure usage by the travel agents. Plan in advance to ensure integration and simplicity is enabled for great customer experience
• Chat, voice and email are the main omni channels. Strategically prioritize the enhancement of the email-case management tool to match the experience of chat, voice. Identify the need for an online external case channel for travel needs
• Program manages the agent desktop requirements. Defining a strategy to reduce agents need to use 16+ systems to deliver support instead analyze, prioritize and define the ideal state for a one screen agent desktop vision
• Acting as high level owner of TE product feedback and triage, justify and liaise with our product organization on importance of priority tickets (excluding support team: TX, Twilio and agent desktop)
• Own the TE support team strategic prioritization of product change requests based on issue volume, users impacted, revenue impact, and other relevant metrics. Build a long term process which includes Jira agile board, monthly scrum meetings, quarterly prioritization with IT, Data, Security, Product and Travel Experience
• Creation and maintenance of our strategic context based routing. Collaborate, coordinate and educate the Travel Experience organization on our routing strategy. Evolve the routing into an infrastructure that fuels our target operating model setup
• Leading and people managing a small group of Operations Managers to achieve the team’s goals and developing your direct reports.

What We’re Looking For

• Strong organizational skills to manage multiple concurrent projects with varied stakeholders
• Strong ability to clearly develop and document processes
• Ability to develop a strategy, communicate it clearly, and get buy-in and support to execute
• Excellent communication skills and strong emotional intelligence
• Ability to easily create and build relationships across varied teams, in varied locations and time zones, both internally and externally, whilst challenging the status quo
• Creative, solutions-driven person who acts independently whilst keeping your team(s) aligned
• Prioritization legend, understand when and how to say no, or later
• Strong background in the business travel / expense management industry
• A minimum of three years experience managing a team of Individual Contributors