India’s aviation industry, which was one of the worst hit during the pandemic, is flying high once again. But, as air travel numbers go back to pre-pandemic levels, digital has had a major role to play in this bounce-back as top players like Vistara accelerated their digital transformation journeys to offer hyper personalised services to their customers. Looking ahead, we can expect technologies like genAI to open up new possibilities for the sector. In a special interaction, Harpinder Singh, AVP – Product, E-Marketing and Analytics, Vistara, speaks about how digital has helped Vistara address some of the key challenges it was facing and the roadmap for the future. Some edited excerpts:
Q: At Adobe’s Best of SUMMIT event, we discussed how experience-led growth is foundational to the success of every business. As an Adobe partner, can you share your perspective on how digital transformation is evolving as an area of priority for businesses today?
Harpinder Singh: I strongly believe that to transform in the true sense, an organisation must understand the pulse of its business, ecosystem, and customers. The process of redesigning of customer journeys, products, services, and business models across the organisation can be successful only if the whole purpose of transformation is mapped directly to the creation of value. In fact, offering an exceptional customer experience has always been at the heart of all things we do at Vistara.
We have a clear vision and growth aspiration along with a roadmap for digital evolution that clearly links customer experience to value. Since most our customer journeys have significant digital intervention, the digital component forms a key part of this journey. We are looking at CX holistically and agnostic of channels. But, the speed of transformation is slower in the civil aviation sector as it is governed by strict regulations. All activities in the industry are governed by regulations from one or more countries. Any new process or technology change that we bring about needs to be tested from several perspectives including, but not limited to, security, safety, adoption at airports in multiple countries, passenger rights, aviation laws, scalability, etc.
Q: What role has digital played in accelerating business growth for Vistara. Can you enlist some of the key challenges and opportunities that digital can help organisations address?
Harpinder Singh: Before the pandemic, there was a very clear distinction between customers who preferred using digital channels and those who preferred physical channels. The pandemic eliminated these boundaries between ‘digital only’ and ‘physical only’ customers to a large extent. Today, customers expect a seamless experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. In order to enable this, data, platforms, and operations across the organisation need to be aligned to deliver a seamless, omnichannel customer experience.
While this sounds very simple, it is actually fairly complex to achieve. Firstly, most of the enterprise platforms available in the market do not have out-of-the-box integration with other ecosystems and even if they do, they are limited strictly to one-on-one connections and are hard to scale or extend any further. Secondly, there are challenges related to enablement, time, cost, and demonstrability of the possible ROI from such massive integrations. These also mean a lot of process transformation along with enablement of the frontline staff as they are the ones who need to leverage the outcome of these integrations in the conversations and communication they have with customers.
This is where digital comes into play as it makes the adoption of outcomes relatively simple to deploy. And more importantly, it is easier to experiment, fail fast, learn, and improve. The impact of change is also easy to measure, analyse, and demonstrate. We are working incrementally towards our vision of serving our customers with hyper-personalised communication across all channels and touchpoints and elevating their overall digital experience to the next level.
Q: Can you tell us about your company’s strategic partnership with Adobe, and the impact of the Adobe Experience cloud solution?
Harpinder Singh: Adobe has been a key technology partner in our digital journey. I strongly believe that simply onboarding a platform does not give much value to the organisation. It is the adoption and democratisation of the platforms that helps in leveraging the platform to its potential and getting value of the investments. We are currently using multiple solutions from Adobe — AEM as our CMS, ACM as our marketing communications platform, Adobe Target for personalisation, A/B testing and experimentation, and Adobe Analytics as our primary digital analytics platform. At Vistara, we have gradually expanded our MarTech stack, setting these up one after the other and ensuring that we are able to realise value out of the investments that go into each platform before expanding our ambit. We have built strong processes, hired and trained people on using the platforms to position ourselves as an organisation that is focused on delivering exceptional digital experiences to customers.
Q: Looking ahead, what is next on your organisation’s digital mission for customers?
Harpinder Singh: While the merger is no longer a secret, we still continue to invest in our platforms (digital and otherwise) to deliver a world class experience to our customers. We are focused on delivering exceptional, seamless, and empathetic content and communication across channels to our customers. We will continue treading on our path to hyper personalisation and consistent incremental improvement by testing constantly and failing fast. We are also exploring the possibilities that genAI has opened up and plan to bring that into our ecosystem in a sustainable, scalable and secure manner that ensures there is no compromise on the security and stability of systems and data.
Disclaimer: This article has been produced on behalf of the brand by HT Brand Studio.
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Updated: 12 Sep 2023, 10:14 AM IST