Millennials have gained repute for their inclination to prioritize experiences over products. A study by Harris Group found that about two thirds of the youth surveyed would rather like to spend over experiences such as a rejuvenating trip or a wholesome meal in the city’s newest restaurant over buying physical products. Consumer behaviour is thus, changing when compared with past trends wherein consumerism was more or less linked to buying material products such as apparel, housing, cars etc.
What has led to this change? The rise of social media is definitely one of the main reasons that have pushed people to indulge in experiences that they see their peers enjoying. There is this inexplicable need to constantly compare your life with others’ and try to keep up.
Financial assistance for travel
There is a growing number of young Indian population that has opted for taking personal loans or customized holiday loans, to satisfy the wanderlust in them. In most of these agreements, the loan amount acts as a safety cushion so as to enhance the full experience of a destination and helps travellers truly explore places without worrying about the expenses.
Some of these loan borrowers have also confessed that travel loans help inculcate in them a discipline to travel, which is otherwise considered a luxury. They plan these holidays the same way that one would plan an investment. Customers who have opted for this rather new way of travel, feel it reduces the financial burden while they get to truly enjoy with their family. Recognising the growing demand in this sector, travel companies have started tying up with financial institutions to offer custom-made unsecured travel loans.
Growth of B2B E-commerce
B2B e-commerce is set to be the next big thing, especially in India with large entrepreneurs pouring in resources to leverage on this opportunity. Known as one of the biggest economies in the world, India is geared up to enrich the e-commerce experience so as to make it more attractive for investors around the globe. The country’s GDP is set to reach USD 3 trillion by 2020. Out of this, USD 39 billion was contributed, solely, by the e-commerce market in 2017. This number is predicted to rise to USD 64 billion by 2020.
Another noteworthy point is that India has allowed 100% FDI for B2B E-commerce traders thus making interested B2B business owners to establish business on the country’s soil without paying for any investment or establishment cost.
Besides, large players such as Make My Trip and Uber have also announced business-friendly versions. MMT has launched a specialized app called “MMT for Business” to cater to corporate entities. Uber has introduced special features for businesses wherein employees and customers can request rides from the Uber app and can expense or charge them directly to the company’s account.
Personalisation is the key in Travel E-commerce
In the face of cut-throat competition today, in the E-commerce market, personalisation is the key to make your business the better choice for your customers. E-commerce personalisation refers to the creation of personal interactions and experiences on your website by dynamically showing media, product suggestions or content based on a customer’s browsing behaviour, purchase history data, demographics and psychographics.
To integrate a system of advanced e-commerce personalisation in your website, data such as type of device, location, recently viewed products, abandoned carts, past purchases and past email interactions must be captured.
Similarly for travel businesses, the company’s website or mobile application must be able to attract customers through targeted Google, Facebook and Instagram ads that can identify prospective customers based on their past searches. The app and website must also be programmed to personalise user experience.
For instance, MMT shows you hotel recommendations based on the flights you searched. It also shows you travel destinations based on your past bookings and your search history. Wandertrust is another travel website that offers customised travel packages wherein the destination is a surprise for you. It makes a curated holiday for you by collecting specific information from you such as past destinations visited (so those will be excluded), whether you like adventure or leisure, type of accommodation preferred, etc.
Research before starting-up
Starting-up a new business can be exciting, but you need to do a thorough preliminary research before taking the leap. There is a lot of data available that could help you find statistics and information related to the sector you are planning to venture into. You’ll also need to study consumer behaviour with respect to the sector you want to venture into. Companies like Skift help you to analyse your business venture through various research data such as news articles and recent reports or surveys.
Business Process Excellence
Business process excellence is about so much more than just process improvement techniques. It’s largely about learning how to solve problems and manage change, performance, and the company’s work culture to align with overall business strategies.
These are some steps that are involved in implementing Business Process Excellence in your Travel E-commerce business
– Customer is indeed, the king
The Lean principle is to employ your resources into what adds value to the customer and do your best to refrain from doing anything that doesn’t. From this basic idea, books, business plans, and training programmes have been created around the idea of finding out what’s useful to the customer and what isn’t. It helps to have a good dialogue with customers to get their feedback about what you’re doing, and focus on resolving pain points without changing the things that customers love about your company.
– Know what you’re doing
You need to have a thorough understanding of what happens within your business, from bottlenecks in your supply chain, to how your invoices get generated and paid. If you eliminate waste from the system, you pave the way for greater efficiency. For example – imagine auditing your business processes and finding that there are two teams employed to do the same task. One team completes the task much faster than the other. Find out the reasons behind this, and delegate all the tasks to the faster team. Give another set of tasks to the other team.
This is also known as ‘process mining’ and can help you find efficiencies throughout the organization that may affect the roles people take on, the technology being used, and even the structure of the organization itself. Process mining can help you improvise on what you are already doing, pass on best practices within the organization, and reveal further opportunities for change.
– Change what you’re doing
If you want visible results when it comes to Process Excellence, you might have to have to change quite a few things about the way your company is working. If you’re not prepared to do so, you’re not prepared to change for the better. Of course, bringing about change is easier said than done.
– Motivate your people
People aren’t machines, and won’t do what you tell them to do unless they are motivated from within. You need to understand what drives people and use that information to bring out the behaviour you want to see. It can help to know what drives individuals within your team: some of them will be solely motivated by money; some may want more time off. Research shows that one of the most effective ways that has proven to engage employees is to involve them in the decision-making roles of the business.
– Rely on outsourcing
Outsourcing processes and Robotic Process Automation have been two of the biggest trends in recent years. Both ideas involve getting expensive processes done elsewhere at a better cost. RPA is a revolutionary technology that is able to perform the repetitive, predictable tasks that humans find monotonous. Robots can be quick, powerful, and accurate in the right roles. There is some debate over whether RPA will be able to overtake outsourcing. However, tasks that require skill and human touch will be difficult to automate and will require manual outsourcing.
– Use tech-based solutions
Things are constantly changing – artificial intelligence is teaming up with bots to make them more and more accurate and powerful; there’s a tech-based solution to many previously intractable business problems, and they are getting more affordable and accessible every day.
– Don’t be afraid to fail
Sir Ken Robinson has quoted, ‘If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.’ Innovation and failure are both a part of any business and the trick is not to avoid failure, but to avoid repeating the same mistake. Failure is just an opportunity to test processes to their best limit – and then to work at maximum capacity. It has been reported that 50% of startups fail in the first 4 years of launching, mainly because of their inability to improvise or learn from previous mistakes.
Your Retail Coach has been known as a trusted business consultancy service. They have a team of experienced professionals that can help implement business process excellence in your company.
YourRetailCoach provides SOP, Market Research and Business Plan consulting. To connect, you can drop a mail at [email protected] or call at +91-9860-426-700.
YRC Related Articles: How to Write SOPs for Marketing?, 6 Ways To Grow Your Business, How to Start a Retail Business in India, Business Expansion Plan for Small Entrepreneurs, Six Steps to Writing a Great SOP for Retail, How to write SOPs for an Apparel Brand?, How to Develop SOPs for Quick Service Restaurant?, How to write SOPs for Furniture Showroom
