Hidden fees, fluctuating rates and foreign languages make switching currencies while traveling confusing, frustrating and costly. With YouTrip, users can pay in more than 150 currencies at the best exchange rates—without worrying about transaction or cross-border fees. Launched in 2018 as Southeast Asia’s first in-app, multi-currency mobile wallet, YouTrip has since been downloaded over 1.5 million times by savvy travelers.
From day one, YouTrip adopted Slack as its productivity platform facilitating engagement for all employees in the secure, channel-based messaging platform. “It was a no-brainer to choose Slack,” says Kelvin Lam, YouTrip’s chief operating officer. “Many companies, startups and friends recommended Slack, and we quickly realised it enabled more efficient productivity and collaboration.”
While the pandemic could have thrown a wrench in YouTrip’s plans to target travelers, Slack empowered the fast-moving company with the agility to pivot and expand its services to include B2B payments, among other products. Grounded in the flexibility and functionality of their digital HQ, YouTrip’s teams never lost steam and continue to serve millions of happy travelers.
“When it comes to team collaboration, announcements, business development and company celebrations, Slack is our digital headquarters where we make our key decisions.”
Enabling organised productivity in Slack channels
YouTrip’s leadership chose Slack because they knew it would best support the company’s hyper growth, evolving with and enabling its workers, rather than slowing them down.
To ensure they continue to serve users in a scalable way, Lam’s responsibilities include overseeing sales, marketing, operations and customer service, and managing his 100-person team across Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand. To enable collaboration from anywhere, the company relies on Slack channels, digital spaces where teams can come together to share messages, workplace automations, digital tools and files.
Team channels include day-to-day conversations and key discussions on upcoming product launches. When there’s a specific project or initiative, they can quickly spin up a new channel. “The ease of creating and arranging channels is important,” Lam says. “With Slack, we’re able to organise ourselves in a very agile way.”
In addition to facilitating work, Slack channels help YouTrip build camaraderie and revolve around everything from animals to industry intel, travel-related news and marketing reports. “Being able to organise everything easily in Slack channels is one of the key things we love to utilise at YouTrip,” Lam says.
YouTrip and its employees value and appreciate transparency at all levels. “Given how convenient and easy Slack is, it helps our employees speak up and stay open about ideas, opinions and concerns,” Lam says. They also use Slack to gather internal feedback on everything from company strategy to what to order for lunch.
“The ability to gather feedback in Slack has helped us create a more open, transparent culture at YouTrip.”
Customised user offers elicit 3x more participation
One of YouTrip’s newest campaigns, YouTrip Surprise, was the result of a data-driven exercise fuelled by creativity and organised by a cross-collaborative effort, all in Slack.
The idea was simple: If a user travels frequently, YouTrip can surprise and delight them with a cash-back pass for travel. Or, if they prefer online shopping, YouTrip will give them a personalised offer for specific discounts with certain merchants.
In the campaign’s Slack channel, YouTrip’s marketing and data teams centralise roadmap priorities, roles and updates. Should they need help from other teams, like engineering, it’s easy to pull them in. They also use the channel for more automated responses, like sharing regular updates about the status and performance of the campaign. “This way, the team can really monitor the performance of YouTrip Surprise and spin up instant conversations and reviews about the results on a daily basis, right in Slack,” Lam says. And it’s working: “We’ve seen three times as much participation in this program from our users.”
“Slack allows us to work in a very harmonious way, enabling us to coordinate and centralize different topics and conversations. It’s almost like an email thread, but more powerful and collaborative.”
Responding to users in half the time
To bring the power of automation to everyone in its productivity platform, YouTrip relies on Slack integrations, including Google Workspace and Calendar, Zoom and DocuSign. “One of the biggest reasons we love Slack is that it doubles as a workflow automation field,” Lam says. “It instantly allows team leads and managers to use our tools in a more productive way.”
YouTrip’s customer service team even spun up its own Slack app to automatically check the status of user requests, which stream in all day long. A customer experience portal provides internal teams with a full snapshot of users, but they wanted a quick, easy way to check customer status and view transaction information.
Using a slash command, anyone can immediately pull up all relevant intel in Slack, and whoever’s available can hop in. “Our custom Slack app really helps our team quickly understand how they can help users, empowering them to deliver a more prompt, accurate response in half the time,” Lam says.
By connecting YouTrip’s teams, tools and processes in a digital space that’s fast, flexible and inclusive, employees are able to deliver the industry’s most innovative experiences.