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Chrome River EXPENSE misses the mark, not for tech reasons but for people and support reasons
September 01, 2020

Chrome River EXPENSE misses the mark, not for tech reasons but for people and support reasons

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 4 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Chrome River EXPENSE

Chrome River EXPENSE is used across our organization for travel authorization and reimbursements. It has made the transition for us from paper forms to electronic forms and authorizations, and automation of payables processing for travel items. Users can enter their own travel expenses or designate a point person for their department.
  • The product is intuitive, if you can shop online you can use this tool.
  • The EXPENSE solution is fairly customizable.
  • Tracking of approvals is transparent to the user.
  • Customer Service is severely lacking at Chrome River.
  • Their tools used for a help desk are an awful experience.
  • Response times vary greatly dependent upon the agent assigned.
  • Senior leadership fails to take responsibility for the action (inaction or lackadaisical action) of their employees.
  • We ended up with such a long investment in rollout that I can't begin to calculate an ROI.
  • It has met the business objective of removing most paper from the workflows.
  • It has met the business objective of providing electronic approval flows.
This is where our customer service nightmare began. Our implementation specialist lacked the proper followup and motivation for us to succeed. There were not enough points of training going into the set up and configuration for us to see the pitfalls or react to them appropriately. Often and ultimately we felt alone in the process.
We had an amazing database manager on our IT side, who worked with the feed requirements of the application and I believe that sustained our success in this area. Due to the limitations of Chrome River EXPENSE customer service and help desk folks, we have had some issues in integration of certain aspects. Had we not been as knowledgeable of our own system, and had great IT support on our end, the project would have failed.
It is highly intuitive for users, however approvers had difficulty with the email approval route and Chrome River EXPENSE wanted so much information from us to even attempt to address the issue, it was less beneficial to wage that battle than it was to suggest to managers who experienced this issue to use the manual approval options in the system.
There isn't enough room here. 200 words would just get me started.

1. Realizing when your customer is struggling is a sure sign you need to invest time in them in order for them to succeed, before you ignore them. We got very little effort by the company despite reaching out on multiple occasions for assistance due to our unique needs.
2. Having a robust customer interface for problem solving is critical. This company struggles with this constantly and has since dismantled their online helpdesk.
The Chrome River EXPENSE module is well suited for larger organizations, and organizations with centralized corporate offices that process payables. The tools contained in the EXPENSE module for travel (my only use) allow for users to submit the reports on the go, and for approvers to approve on the go as well. No one need even see each other to perform the work fully and with good compliance tracking.

Using Chrome River EXPENSE