Go That Extra Mile

Rithish Saralaya, Vice President - Technology Development

 

“Persevere because on the road to success there is never a crowd on the EXTRA MILE”- Charity Gibson

 

Diwali is my favourite time of the year. There is a festivity in the air, laughter, cheer, and great food at every corner and of course a time for family and friends to come together and celebrate. It is also that time of the year when a large number of people travel home and getting a confirmed train booking is virtually impossible unless you book your ticket well in advance. And so, my team and I felt thrilled when we listened to a call from a customer on our Customer-Engineer Day (when developers listen in on customer calls). The customer was delighted with the latest goibibo train booking feature. She informed us that her family was able to travel to meet her on Diwali, thanks to our app’s unique ‘alternate availability’ feature. Let’s go four months back in time to when we started building these features into our app.

 

IRCTC had changed the game when it came to training bookings with over a million bookings happening every day. As an organization in the space of travel, we were also offering train bookings on our platform. However, we realized the booking experience wasn’t seamless, and there was tremendous scope for improvement- from payment errors to technical glitches. And so we took up a project to build features that would encourage customers to book on our app, making it both convenient and customer-friendly. We studied the different challenge areas and started working on building features to address these challenges.

 

The railway is a supply-short system. Customers find it challenging to get a confirmed ticket for their journey. In an industry-first feature, we worked on a feature that would provide an alternate option for a confirmed ticket on the same train for alternative dates but from the same boarding station. This may end up costing the customer a little extra, but gives them an option for a confirmed ticket, just like Tatkal. We didn’t stop here. We wanted to be exceptionally excellent by going the extra mile. We also created the availability calendar that gave the customer a view of the status within the booking calendar itself, in one click instead of multiple clicks.

 

It is true that in times of crisis, we can either give up or try to come together and creatively solve the problem. The availability calendar and the other availability features were helping solve our booking problem, but they were not enough. We created icons on the booking screen that would provide information like meal availability, whether the train runs overnight, cleanliness, etc.  The customer could also see the best available class without having to click multiple times. We also integrated WhatsApp to our booking process and here too, the customer would not only receive their tickets on WhatsApp, but they could also check PNR status, right from their WhatsApp inbox.

 

At the end of it, we nailed it. Our look at the book went up by 4.5X. Booking grew more than 2.5X, and we had 50% conversion boost. But what gave us the most satisfaction was that we helped, in our small way, to bring a family together on Diwali.