Covid-19 has made developers more empathetic to commercial interests: Subramanya Sharma
If there is one positive that has come out of the biggest crisis to hit travel, it is that product has taken centrestage as online travel companies went back to their roots to build new tools and solutions, as well as use the downtime to improve their tech stack.
At Cleartrip, which has always prided itself on being a product-led company, chief strategy officer Subramanya Sharma said it was a “welcome change” to have the spotlight swing back from marketing to product.
“People are cautious about the right time to increase marketing spend because of consumer sentiment and it is good to see people focusing on stuff they can control versus stuff they can’t control. And, for a lot of companies, one thing you can control is product and tech.”
He also feels that Covid-19 has created an environment in which product has become more sensitive to both consumer needs and commercial interests, which he said is a “lethal combination” when you get the balance right.
For one thing, tech developers have become more sensitive to the needs of the business because Covid-19 has put all travel companies on notice and their jobs have been directly threatened. “They’ve never been in this situation before where it’s about the company’s survival and so they have more empathy towards the business, and they see it as an opportunity to solve for this.”
He said he’s seen a big change in mindset from his junior team across engineering and analytics. “We had a hackathon three weeks ago and the participation and ideas that came out were very different – it was less about extreme tech or cool stuff like Augmented Reality but more practical stuff, things that we need now to build consumer confidence.”
His theory is there are generally two types of companies, product-led and business-led. “Product-led tends to be more medium to longterm businesses, building product for consumer needs versus product for commercial interests. The sweet spot is a balance of the two, and that’s when you produce the most value for the company.
“It’s taken us 12-13 years to learn this ourselves.”
The drive to build confidence-building products at warp speed
Sharma believes the products created during the pandemic do tick both boxes – they meet immediate consumer needs as well as produce commercial benefits.
In mid-June, it launched its Travel Safe product for its markets in the Middle East and India, designed to answer customer questions about travelling at this moment with its different rules and restrictions, requirements and protocols, by different parties from airlines to airports and governments.
Building Travel Safe was an interesting challenge for the team, said Sharma, it being more of a content play than a tool. “We hadn’t done a lot of content-first products, so the first thing we did was to put our head of design in charge of it – design is probably the closest to content and we clarified the ownership upfront.”
It also made sure it was differentiated from news sites which carried breaking news. “We wanted a curated site with relevant and timely content. Version 1 was really scrappy, it was just content presented in a nice way. But apart from that, navigation was tough. So when we started putting out the information, we also looked at the data and asked, what are people looking at? And people were basically asking, what’s in it for me? So we built context into the tool to make it more personalised.”
He is aware the complexity will increase as international travel opens up. “How do we integrate this into your normal search flow, into your itineraries, into your apps – I think it’s still early days. This product will morph as travel opens up and picks up.”
The second product it developed is Flexifly, which allows consumers to change flights for free. “These confidence-building products are getting natural traction. We didn’t build them with the intention of driving traffic to our site but they’ve kept our traffic levels fairly healthy because there is a need for such products at this time.”
Rewriting the entire Cleartrip platform, integrating Flyin
The other thing it’s done during this downtime has been to rebuild its entire platform. “We cleared up the engineering, rewrote the entire platform, redid the product architecture. Things that we’d been meaning to get done but couldn’t because of lack of time,” said Sharma.
“There were a few key thinking points behind the new architecture. If you wanted a new promotion, it shouldn’t take so much time. Maintainability of the code also became an issue. New feature requests were also taking more time. We looked at, which components were unstable? For example, when IndiGo or Flynas launched a sale, what features were unstable? Amazon Prime Day Sale – that was very useful learning from the tech standpoint. Some of the tech was old, the world has moved on – so we put in design systems that would allow plug and play.”
In the next two weeks, it will launch a revamped booking flow, thanks to the new platform. “With a new design, with slightly newer technology, it will be easier for us to develop much faster in the next few years.”
It has also integrated Flyin, the Saudi OTA it acquired a few years ago, into one single platform. “We had ingested the back end but the front end was still separate and that came with its own challenges. Now we have combined into one single platform.”
Another area it tackled was customer service and moving it all online. “We stopped support in terms of incoming calls, it’s a large cost, so we said, let’s build out all the tools that are required for customers to do self-serve.
“During Covid, there were lots of specific nuances – like some airlines said we would do open tickets, some said airline credits – so we built a system for some of these airlines to handle these online. For example, with IndiGo or Spicejet, people could come in and use their credit, it was almost like a new payment option we introduced for airline credit.
“This period really accelerated our focus on online customer service.”
Another area it focused on was distribution partnerships with companies such as banks and tech partners like Amazon. “It was a good way for them to start building awareness so that if travel comes back, they can offer specific travel information. Travel is one of the biggest GMV drivers for anyone and it is important for these brands to remain top of mind among consumers.”
One-way travel, Tier 2 cities and digitisation of payments
Sharma said much remains to be done to help build traveller confidence in this unstable and uncertain environment, adding that Cleartrip was fortunate to be in different markets which were at different stages of the crisis.
“The UAE is opening up, Saudi Arabia is in fairly good shape and India is about 50-60% of capacity. What’s interesting in India is we are seeing lots of travel one-way and huge traffic to Tier 2 cities. In terms of payments, the usage of non credit card payments has increased in Saudi and India. There’s definitely digitisation of payments happening.
“Fintech is going to be big and with fintech companies getting into distribution, it will be an interesting trend to watch.”
Another interesting tech trend he’s watching is the commoditisation of big data. “There are enough stacks of data out there. It’s not a competitive advantage but it’s a competitive disadvantage if you don’t use it.”
Sharma, who is working from home in Bangalore, believes that working remotely for the past six months has had no impact on productivity. “The way we work has changed. We used to block a time and place to meet. Now we focus on writing out documents, circulating them before the meeting and this has increased clarity of meetings and the quality of discussions is higher.”
Note: Product will take centrestage during WiT Experience Week, September 28-October 1. Submit your entries to our Open Call for Covid-19 Product Innovation and Business Pivot. Deadline for entries: August 30.