I was invited to speak, in fact deliver a closing keynote, at FTE – Asia event last month. I gladly accepted the opportunity to attend the expo and present Microsoft’s view of travel industry with a focus on customer journey.
First of all, it was an amazing experience meeting so many stake holders from the industry including, but not limited to, customers and partners from all over Asia. I believe the organizers did a great job of creating a collaborative and creative environment around the expo that enabled so many thought provoking conversations during and around expo/sessions.
I personally enjoyed all the conversations with customers and partners as it allowed us to not only focus on real challenges and opportunities around key transformational initiatives that industry is driving but also have a forward looking view of how things could look like in a very near future.
Cabin Connectivity Workshop:
I also participated in a workshop around connectivity and crew mobility and this is a rough mind-map that we came up with to summarize our conversation. We started with cabin connectivity and soon realized that a theme was evolving that cabin connectivity becomes an enabler of “xyz”. Of course, we focused on aspects positively impacting customer experiences and identified those moments as “Nirvana” moments. We identified multiple of those moments and agreed that crew empowerment via crew mobility solutions was a key to creating to those “Nirvana” moments for passengers.
Closing Keynote:
I started by highlighting Microsoft’s vision and mission which is grounded in the both the world we live in and the future we strive to create. Today we live n a mobile-first, cloud-first world, and the transformation we are driving across our businesses is designed to enable Microsoft and our customers and partners to thrive in this world.
From a travel industry perspective, our focus is on delivering travel transformation by enabling:
1- Empowered Workforce: Digital capabilities that drive productivity gains and effective/relevant servicing across all touch points within the traveler journey.
2- Connected Operations: Digital capabilities that modernize the business functions of the travel services provider to grow revenue, manage costs, and deliver a world-class service.
3- Customer Experience: Digital capabilities that connect with the customer context across the traveler journey and enable services that are provide ultra convenience, relevance, and/or have a wow factor
I was able to share some concrete references of how these capabilities are being enabled across the world and showed a couple of videos that resonated very well with the audiences. I closed the session by reiterating that Microsoft as a company has a vision and mission that states “Empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more” and to that end we will continue to innovate across all dimensions and provide platform and capabilities for our customers and partners to build on top of.
Thank you note:
I would personally like to thank Daniel Coleman (Company Director and Founder @ FTE) and his team for successfully organizing FTE Asia in Singapore and looking forward to joining them next year for an even bigger and better FTE Asia event.
Also, I would like to thank Greg Jones, Microsoft’s WW Director of Travel and Hospitality for providing guidance and support.