Cost Cutting Versus Customer First

Vipul Doshi 0:00

most of us have taken as the first job with AI as the one of reducing costs. So the customer is not at the center of it, profits are at the center of it. The moment you start designing everything around the customer, the equation changes.

Meet Vipul And The Travel Problem

Joeri Billast 0:20

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast. I'm your podcast host, and today I'm honored to be joined by Vipul. Hey, Vipul. How are you?

Vipul Doshi 0:32

Good, Joeri. Thank you. How are you doing?

Joeri Billast 0:35

I'm good. Sunny day, today here in Sintra. Guys, if you're now wondering who I'm speaking with, well, Vipul Doshi, he's a tech entrepreneur, and he has co-founded Zenvoya. To redefine travel and make it a joyful experience. Vipul, as my listeners know, I love to dive straight in, I did my research, and I know that, after more than two decades, scaling IGT solutions from a small team into a global business. did you come to believe about travel that eventually, made you want to start again with, Zenvoya?

Why Travel Breaks After Booking

Vipul Doshi 1:15

Great question, Joeri. yeah, sometimes I scratch my head as well and wonder why am I doing this again? Some twenty-five years ago, I started with IGT, very small at the time, some thirty people, working with one or two clients. And in twenty-five years I was with them, or actually a little under twenty-five years, I built a global scale customer experience company focused only on the travel industry. So worked with all the major airlines, major online travel agents, major hotel, chains, just about everybody a traveler to- touches. So the goal there when I was working at IGT was customer experience with the, and the center of it was the traveler And I must admit that after some twenty-five years working there, I mean, we introduced a lot of technology, we introduced a lot of processes, opened up centers in India, Philippines, in Colombia, in Spain, almost all parts of the world. And what I realized is that, since I said I worked across the entire ecosystem of what a traveler touches, it was quite clear to me that the travel industry may have really done a good job in the booking phase as an event, but the poor traveler continues to struggle when there isn't any issue while he's traveling. There's nobody for him to go to. And it happens to me, it has happened to everybody. You miss a flight, your flight is delayed, hotel room has been given away. You miss a flight, you're supposed to have something else going on in the afternoon. Well, too bad. Nobody to take care of you. Nobody even thinking about you. If you are the rich and the famous, you have a person who's doing it for you. But if you are the ordinary people, then you have to take care of yourself. And that's what prompted me, and I used to hear personally many calls. I mean, I used to spend time hearing passenger calls. And I must admit that it was really at times pretty disastrous experience. People were screaming, they had missed flights, they had lost their near and dear ones, and yet they could not make it. And so you know that this is not a very... an, an industry which was really looking after the traveler. And that's really what really got me thinking again that maybe I can do something different when generative AI showed up on the face of Earth. In November twenty twenty-four or November twenty twenty-two is when I heard of ChatGPT for the first time, and I looked at the power of that. Lo and behold, I knew that I need to do something else in my life,

Joeri Billast 4:06

Yeah. I,

Vipul Doshi 4:07

why

Joeri Billast 4:08

I really, see and feel the passion that you have about this, and indeed everyone who is traveling knows what problems we can have and how we can feel, when things happen that are not foreseen. you argue that the biggest weakness in travel, so it's not the booking itself, but what happens after the transaction. So what changes when a company starts designing for the relationship rather than the sale?

Relationship Design Across The Journey

Vipul Doshi 4:34

today, the travel industry looks at the transaction. How can I make that transaction the most efficient? That means the lowest cost and the most profitable one. Well, it forgets that the traveler is really going through searching the destination, planning the itinerary, booking the trip, and then actually managing the trip himself these days. What I think really happened here was we lost track of the traveler, but everybody else didn't care. So that's the part that I thought was going to be the most effective is we focus on building a relationship with the customer throughout the journey, and the journey starts far before the actual travel starts. It starts with the planning, the discovery, the booking, and knowing the traveler is equally an important step in booking. And subsequently, when they are actually on travel on the trip, then knowing the traveler, what do they like? Where do they want to eat? It's going to rain. They had a day out. Is somebody watching for that? Now, this is only possible today with on scale basis, only with technology. It cannot happen with human beings. Human beings are very expensive. So AI, for the first time, offers us that opportunity to build that relationship with the traveler, to build that thing at a scale. You can have a personal assistant, and I can have one. My personal assistant should know me well, and your personal assistant should know you well. And that's what really we are trying to build, Joeri, on this, where I think

Joeri Billast 6:18

Yeah, I love that, because how people look at AI these days is a lot about productivity, but here relationships or relations. so AI becomes an ongoing companion, eh, rather than a search or support tool. And how does it change what should consider the actual product experience?

Brand Promises AI Must Keep

Vipul Doshi 6:41

Oh, great question again. Marketers, make the promise. They deliver a narrative, and now the question is, today human beings deliver the experience, and in not too far away, a lot of AI will deliver the same experience. The question is: Is AI going to be, unsympathetic, not caring, or is it going to carry the values of the organization? And that's where, the role of the marketer in relationship to the AI becomes extremely important. They cannot be separated in my opinion. If the marketer is setting a narrative, then that narrative needs to carry throughout the organization. And when I say throughout the organization, even the AI has to have similar values as what the marketer has narrated. So in some ways, there is a convergence of, customer service and marketing. In the past, they were two different departments. The marketing department promised something, the customer service department something completely different. So marketer set his brand positioning, customer service guy came in and delivered a completely different brand. The marketer said, "I am going to be very, sympathetic to you. I will be taking care of you. I'm warm, I'm very relationship oriented." Well, when the traveler needed customer service and he calls up the call center and then he's told, "Oh, you are fifty-first person on the line, it will take an hour and a half to get to you," imagine the experience. What was promised, what was delivered. That I think is where the current industry stands, and I think that needs to change and that even when AI comes in, it cannot be looked upon just as an automation tool. It has to learn the values of your company and your organization so that you deliver the same values that you had promised originally. And that will change trust, that will change relationship, and then it becomes a very different discussion we are having about the customer

Joeri Billast 8:52

Yeah. I know that you mentioned, the word trust, and it's a whole different game then, huh? I actually, will come back to that, but it's also, I mentioned it in my book, this part. now I've looked at what you have been posting

Information Abundance And The Rise Of Judgment

Joeri Billast 9:06

on the social media. I think it was on LinkedIn or somewhere else that you have written that AI's collapsing the information advantage companies once had over customers. And so when is information no longer scarce? If that happens, what becomes then the new source of trust and differentiation?

Vipul Doshi 10:12

so yeah, I think many things are changing in the industry. in the early days it was the supply pool, the inventory, and whoever had the inventory was the king. the thing was, if I had the content, I'm the king. Well, that is now easily available. Everybody has access to the same information, same inventory. So that's not really a differentiation anymore. Then came technology, more systems that helped automate or digitize transactions. So we were the transaction. We were making them more efficient, but that also did not really do anything about, the trust part of it or, the relationship part of it. Now comes the new part. AI does the work for you. AI is the one who knows Joeri really well. And so when Joeri goes out and searches for flights or hotels or restaurants, and he wants to take a five-day break or a four-day break, whatever it is, and then he says, "Hmm, I need a, a hotel that is in the city center, vegetarian place. I need a flight in the morning. I like to take an aisle seat." Now, this information is what the AI should really know about Joeri. The preferences should be known to your, to the AI. Whereas today you get is a information download. So there's a lot of information, and you get a download of all of that. You'll get all the hundred flights, you'll get all the five thousand hotels available, but you have to do the hard work. You have to figure out which hotel to pick, which flight to take. And then the next time when you go and do the same thing again, Joeri, you will start that whole process again. They don't remember anything about you. AI allows you, in our opinion, AI allows you to carry the context, understand your intent. Intent is probably one of the biggest things, so that's the other piece that's changed. So information is not-- I mean, information is available in galore, but what is not, available is judgment. The ability to say that's really, I mean, in our case, Joeri, at Zenoya, what we are trying to say is, you will not do the hard work. We know you from the past. We know the context. You've told us something. We understand your intent. Sometimes you'll say, "Well, I want to take a morning flight," and this happens to my daughter a lot. she wants an aisle seat. If she doesn't get an aisle seat, she'll drop the flight That is something that, I mean, normally you will have to work your way through the whole thing. Well, can AI do that job? And I think that's what the difference is. So information is there, who does the work for you on your behalf? And can it be done at scale? I think I keep going back to scale, but it-- can it be done at scale? It can be done at scale now. I can actually go and say, "I need a hotel. I need it near Eiffel Tower. I need a vegetarian restaurant around. I need, a high floor, sea view." I can specify what, and, and, and, and the AI will know me so well that it will actually remember that for the next time as well

Joeri Billast 13:32

Yeah. Now indeed you say at scale, user at scale, many companies are using I- AI primarily

Loyalty Metrics Beyond Handling Time

Joeri Billast 13:39

to reduce costs or automate service at scale. But where is the line between smart efficiency and accidentally destroying the human moments that create loyalty?

Vipul Doshi 13:53

I think most of us have taken as the first job with AI as the one of reducing costs. How can I make it more efficient? So the customer is not at the center of it, profits are at the center of it. The moment you start designing everything around the customer, the equation changes. The loyalty kicks in as well. The loyalty is a function of, do I trust you? do I get serviced the way I like to be serviced every time? Do you remember my likes and dislikes? It's not about every time writing an email. when a standard email comes with your name, that's not personalization. I mean, anybody can do that, right? Dear Vipul. Dear Jo-Joeri. Anybody can do that. But can you actually go beyond that and say, "Okay, what are your likes?" So loyalty deeper personalization. It's important to build those algorithms which will allow us to understand the context as well. So personalization is important, so is context. Sometimes you may have a budgetary constraint. You may like to be in a five-star hotel, but you have a budgetary constraint. Can your AI help you with that? So I think the concept of loyalty in the future is, going to be more around building that trust and faith with the customer through, actions that you do. It's not about always cutting. I mean, what i-what is the current mode? And I've run this, for the last twenty-five years. You incentivize the call center agent today to continue to reduce the average handling time. If it was eight minutes, you'll say, "Can you do it in six minutes?" And the guy is watching the clock, he's trying to slam the phone down so that hi-his APIs don't get impacted, his incentives don't get impacted, but poor customer doesn't get serviced. So the customer will call again. So now can AI be built in a way that the repeat calls go down, the engagement level goes up? Ar-are we thinking of those metrics? So your metrics have also got to change from, average handling time to what's my repeat engagement? What's the lifetime value of the customer? These are the new metrics that one has to take care of rather than the old one, which were all around operational efficiencies, and cost was really the focus there

Joeri Billast 16:22

Yeah. So you see banks, event platforms, HR systems, and other companies

Banks And Brands As New Travel Distributors

Joeri Billast 16:29

potentially becoming travel companies because they already own the audience and the relationship. What does that tell marketers about the future of distribution and customer acquisition?

Vipul Doshi 16:42

So this is where I think, again, I don't want to really, talk a lot about what we are trying to do at Zenoya, but one of the things that we fundamentally believe is if you own the customer relationship, if you are a bank, the customer comes, banks with you, you understand the customer extremely well. You know what their spend patterns are. You know where, when they travel, how they travel. You have a very deep understanding of the customer already. But what you do is you hand the customer over To an OTA or somebody else. and that's where the individual goes and buys their tickets, buys their hotels, probably not even service during the journey, and so very broken experience subsequently. I think today there is an opportunity with, the type of, platforms that are getting built. The opportunity is there for anybody with loyal customers, whether it's a bank, whether it's a credit card company, whether it's a foreign exchange company, or, I mean, there is an airline out there, that only sells flights today. For all of them to continuously work with their loyal customers. They have developed this customer base with a great deal of effort, but then there is no point for letting them go away. You can continue to give them or deliver these customers the experience that they have with you on platforms, the new age platforms, where they can actually, connecting into these platforms is very easy. of course you want your brand and you want your logos, and you want the vibes that you want from your, platform. But the reality is that the customer can move from the bank when they want to purchase travel. You can be the one who provides that travel interface. So, companies like Xenoya, and I'm sure there are many others, who are building the infrastructure, building the supply pool, the entire thing, and in a way that they become pa-- I mean, you just become a plug-and-play type of a model rather than actually, building it ground up, and which is where most of these, companies will fail to do. So that's what we provide, and that's what, we think that there's a great opportunity to monetize the customer even more than what you do today. You don't need to let them go away. Travel is a big category of expense, and everybody these days loves travel. Everybody wants to have experiences. They want Instagram reels. Well, don't let that traveler go away somewhere else. connect them to your systems in a way that it smoothly flows into the travel products as well.

Joeri Billast 19:27

Yeah, I think now today in a world where we are working so much on, devices like, smartphones or computers or, AI,

Entrepreneur Playbook For Engagement And Trust

Joeri Billast 19:34

people want to travel, they want to meet other people, they want to live experiences. and so my next question would be if, the most valuable asset is increasingly the audience and the relationship rather than the inventory or the price, should entrepreneurs rethink where they build competitive advantage?

Vipul Doshi 19:57

I think the entrepreneurs have to go back to the basics. And the basics are about building relationships, getting access to data, building trust. And I would say that, today, for the new age entrepreneurs, there is an opportunity to build platforms at far lesser of a cost than what it used to be in the past. It used to take an army to build a platform, let's say an OTA. it no longer is required. So the entrepreneurs have an opportunity to build a platform, much, much cheaper, and then they have the opportunity to connect up with the ecosystem of travel in a way... I'm talking about travel because, that's the industry I really know well. but in a way that, it doesn't really require them to build everything up from ground up. So the entrepreneurs really need to focus on the customer. How do I know my customer well? What kind of relationships do I want to build with them? How do I keep my engagement with my customers really going on? As an example, I'll give you a very simple example. Travel is not a constantly engaging category. You travel three, four, five times in a year max. so you'll only go to the platform three, four, five times. Now you need to think about what do I need to do? Is there some sort of a gamification I can do on the platform so that my traveler continues to engage with me? They earn some points, and they play some, trivia, and therefore there, there is engagement going on. Otherwise, the traveler comes to your, your platform only a few times in a year. So There is another aspect to it. Most people travel in a group The entrepreneur needs to think about how can I actually facilitate a group travel in a much more smoother way? I mean, half the time what happens, somebody who has a louder voice in a group, that's what everybody ends up doing, whether you want it or you don't want it, right? Or, how do you split the budget? How do you ensure that everybody's budget is being taken into consideration? So there's so much opportunity for an entrepreneur today, to sort of change the paradigm of how travel is sort of experienced. if the customer is on the trip, I also think that's a whole world of opportunity. Just while the passenger is on the trip, there is the opportunity to be there all the time with the passenger. When the weather goes bad, when the geopolitical event happens that may impact the flight or, let's say there is a change of plan on an activity that you had originally planned, there's an opportunity to actually come back with alternatives to your, But then again, all of these actions will help you create trust and build a deeper relationship. Because once the traveler sees that somebody's taking care of me, the likelihood of them coming back is extremely high, which does not happen in today's world. So that's where I would ask the entrepreneurs of today to focus on, is focus on relationship, focus on trust, focus on data, get to know your customer extremely well.

Joeri Billast 22:59

Okay, makes a lot of sense. Let's now look it at another way. If you could get marketers or founders

Unlearning AI As Pure Automation

Joeri Billast 23:06

to unlearn, one deeply held assumption about AI, customer relationships, or growth over the next, five years, would it be?

Vipul Doshi 23:17

I think, the fundamental, belief in the minds of most people when it comes to AI is about, automation. They think of AI as something that's going to automate. We want to eliminate friction in the process. We don't want to eliminate the human being in the process completely. We don't want the human being to do the mechanical jobs, the repetitive jobs. But we do need the human being, for the empathetic part of the journey. So thinking of AI as an automation tool, is a very narrow definition. One has to expand the definition of, what can AI do for me. you can even now think of relationship at scale, which wasn't possible earlier. You had to hi-hire an army of people to do that. And even those army of people were really told to not build a relationship, build a transactional, efficiency system. So I think these are the things that I would, say that, that's what the marketing team has to unlearn. And then, of course, the metric has to change. The metric used to be around efficiency and how much time do you take to engage with the customer and what's the profitability? But the metric has to change about engagement. I would move everything into more of engagement model. So how much engagement, how much repeat engagement, how many re-purchases, when the customer is on the trip, how many times he actually works with you on the trip? That's super important. So these are the new things that they have to think about for the entire journey. build new metrics, not the old school metrics around efficiencies. And AI gives you that opportunity, Joeri

Joeri Billast 25:02

Well, that's a very powerful message at the end of this podcast episode. Now, Vipul, if people want to know more about what you're building, More

Where To Find Zenvoya And Closing

Joeri Billast 25:10

about your company, how you're changing the travel industry, where would you like me to send them?

Vipul Doshi 25:16

Zenvoya.ai. That's what, experience what we have built. One single conversation for the entire journey, and throughout the journey we'll be with you. So try us, try it out, and love to get the feedback as well from people

Joeri Billast 25:32

Amazing. Well, people, as my listeners know, there are always show notes. There is a blog article available. Everything you mentioned will be found in there, also the links to your website. It was a real pleasure to have you on the show today

Vipul Doshi 25:46

Thank you very much, Joeri. I enjoyed speaking to you, and I hope, this will be valuable to the audience as well

Joeri Billast 25:53

I'm sure this is valuable to my audience because, a lot of people travel or love to travel. A lot of people see AI every day. So I think it makes a lot of sense. So if you are listening and you say, "Wow, this episode, I really need to share it with my neighbor," with your friend, with another entrepreneur, with a marketer, with someone who travels a lot, please do that. Share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, well, this is a good moment to do that, to hit the subscribe button. If you haven't given me a review yet, if you give at least five stars, this really goes a long way. And of course, I would love to see you back next time. Take care.

Vipul Doshi 26:30

Thank you

Joeri 26:32

a special thanks as well to RYO, uh, the main sponsor of Web3 CMO Stories, supporting conversations at the intersection of Web3 AI and the future of digital leadership.