Trust Makes the World Go Round

Dhruv Pathak, Vice President - Technology Development

 

 

They say that love makes the world go round. I disagree. It is actually trust. Think about it—all our everyday transactions are based on trust. You trust that the alarm on your phone is ringing when it should, and that the clock isn’t lying to you. You trust that the milk your child is drinking is safe and healthy. You trust that the cereal you’re eating has ‘no added sugar’. You trust that the guy at the petrol pump is filling petrol, and not diesel in your petrol car. You trust that Google maps has got your expected time of arrival bang on, and you won’t be late to work today. And if you are late, you trust that your boss will be too.

 

This trust is what ties us to our customers too. Just like any other service, the customer is relying on us to deliver on our promise. And if we don’t, in all probability, we have lost the customer. Keeping trust at the centre of our decision-making, we decided to build a community-driven content platform where travellers could upload real photos of hotels clicked by them.

 

The premise of our project was to create a neutral platform, where travellers could see the honest truth. This would help us manage expectations and impact two things— increase the conversion rate, and hopefully change the mind of customers who had a bad experience to make better, more informed decisions. In the end, it was not only about gaining trust but also keeping it.

 

The goal was aspirational, but executing it on ground was difficult and filled with challenges and frustration. We were coding a machine learning system to identify the nature of the photograph, in order to rank it by clarity and thereby give a complete picture to the customer. Like an image of a pool, the system ranks the clearest one on top by evaluating it through multiple angles. How can you get a coder to care about this? How will what they’re doing impact the company and the business? The only way to do so was by giving every member of the team a big picture view. 

 

The idea of the community platform was to build trust and experiment to see what we can do— other than offers— to increase conversion and win the trust of our detractors. In the end, our efforts paid off. Thanks to the efforts put in by each member of the team, at every level, there was an increase in 1000 room nights per day. Isn’t that a great way to measure something as intangible as trust?

 

I also believe that like most good habits, honesty has a ripple effect that can be seen over many years to come. This is only the beginning.