Mind Set is Everything

Abhishek Aggarwal, Director - Product Management

 

 

“Eliminate what does not help you evolve”.

 

There is a lot of emphasis on getting people to book that flight ticket, inspiring them to take that holiday and to further, simplify that process. But what happens when things go wrong? What happens when someone wishes to change their booking date? That’s where my team and I come in. 

 

On diving deep into this issue, we realized that our old funnel was really outdated. It required the customer to cancel a ticket and rebook it, when all they wanted to do was, change the date. The number of queries our support team would get around this issue were huge and our process was not built to accommodate this request by inconveniencing the customer. We realized the old system was leading to a lot of incomplete flows and the customer had to wait for a call back. In this age of machine learning, human involvement for something like this seemed inefficient, so we decided to solve this problem on priority.

 

The process involved building a new funnel by integrating the application interfaces from all airlines. This was no easy task but we had our mind set on making it happen. The new funnel went up in a record time and it allowed a customer to change dates instead of canceling and re-booking. This also had a monetary benefit for the customer as he would just need to pay the date change fee to the airline.

 

Moving from old to new always comes with its set of challenges. More than the technology development itself, it is the resistance in mind set that has to be dealt with. Gautam Malhotra, who was managing this project, brought together several teams to make this happen—from finance to flights, and also the different airlines on board, by constantly talking to them about the big picture impact and showing them the possible benefits.

 

Today, we are already seeing a tremendous impact. The new funnel is converting better by 3-4% points. The number of calls around this issue have dropped by 35%.

 

We are the only Indian online travel aggregator to have date change on international flights. We launched this feature on three international airlines in May and will be live on sixty more by the end of October 2019. So, while a customer’s travel plans might change due to any reason, we want them to know that we are there with them through the good and the bad; in sickness and in health!