American Express Keynote

Transcript

Robert Tedesco:Thanks, Peter, for the introduction, and it's great to see so many familiar faces in the audience, and it's always great to spend time here with everyone at CAPA. I think it's been a really exciting time for our industry, be it travel or financial services. Range of many new innovations that we're seeing take hold in our businesses. We've got things like blockchain, AI, open data platforms. There's a range of new innovations that are there, things to be excited about, and I think perhaps some of that excitement is tempered by fake news and orange suntans and scary political tweets, but on the whole, I think it's a pretty exciting time for all of us. I can't hope to cover all of that change today. However, I did think it might be interesting to explore the impact of that changing environment on customer engagement. I think customer engagement and loyalty, they play a key role in all our lives. I think for the corporate travel managers in the room, the retention of key staff is an increasingly important part of your remit, particularly amongst millennials. I think for the suppliers in the room, building a loyalty program that engages customers across multiple channels and delivers personalized experiences is becoming increasingly vital. And I think American Express probably has a unique view on these things. And I thought today might be good to share 4 of the observations that we have around that customer experience and loyalty piece. So I think the first piece that we cover off on is omnichannel customer engagement. And I think that sounds very impressive— omnichannel, blockchain, and machine learning. If you can get them all in a sentence, you'd probably win corporate word bingo in your offices back at work. But simply put, omnichannel is about making it easy for customers to engage with you. the way they want to engage with you, reward them for that loyalty, and actively encourage the diversity of that engagement. I think at American Express, we try and reward our customers in a range of different ways, in the way in which they want to engage with us. We reward them for how they spend with us through our offers platform. We reward our customers for how they spend, and we do that by partnering with a variety of digital wallets, be it Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay. We reward our customers for their advocacy. We have a member-get-member program where we reward them with points. We reward our customers for their loyalty to their favorite merchants through our Local Champion initiative, which is we have our member favorite merchants, and if you spend most regularly there, you can earn multiples of points when you spend with those merchants. We're even exploring blockchain and how we bring that into loyalty, and that opens up a range of new opportunities. We're currently trialing that with a company called Boxed in the US. And essentially the blockchain sits between the inventory system of our merchants and between our loyalty platforms and allows them to talk to each other. For the airline industry, that might mean if you wanted to over-index on your rewards for a certain route, you could. You give 3x rewards for a route and ordinary rewards for another route. You could reward for certain inventory types. that you want to bonus on that might be slow moving. So there's a great opportunity for us to use the technology to deliver more and more rewards and positive customer experience for our customers. And I think on customer experience, there's many ways you can do that omnichannel as well. I love the Disney MagicBand. It's a really simple kind of concept. You check in at the hotel. You get your little Disney band. It opens up your hotel room. You plan what you want to do in the parks the next day, and then you enter each of the attractions using your band. If you want to buy food when you're out and about, you use the band and it comes back to your hotel bill. Even for those crummy photographs that you get throughout the theme park, you can get them done to your band and delivered to your email address. So it's a really great experience. It's just end-to-end. It's very simple. You engage with it the way you want to. You can plan on your mobile phone and then experience that live. It's a great way to use omnichannel to engage a customer and give them a positive experience. I think the thing about millennials is millennials expect that omnichannel recognition. I think that represents an interesting challenge for travel managers looking to engage with that digital native population. And it throws up a great couple of questions for travel managers as well. I think you'll be increasingly challenged by your organization on how you recognize those best travelers, or what represents the best traveler in an organization. What do they look like today? What do they look like in the future? Are they the people who provide helpful tips to other travelers? Do they find innovative ways to save? What is it about a traveler's behavior that you want to reward and recognize? now and into the future. I think our second observed trend is that engaged customers expect personalisation. Providing relevant and easy access to information and insights is increasingly important. I mentioned our offer platforms the other day. I thought I'd use myself as a case study, so that's my mobile phone there on the left. The first thing you'll notice is that health insurance is super expensive. The only remedy for that is have less children, I think. The second thing you'll notice is that there's an embedded offer there in my mobile view for Tigerair. And what our algorithm does, our algorithm recognises that I spend overseas, that I'm travelling fairly regularly, and says, hang on a second, this is a guy who might be interested in this offer. It's a relevant offer to me. It's unexpected. It feels like it's made for me. And To take advantage of it, it's very easy. I click on the offer, I click Save to Card, and I'm done. Now when I spend on my Amex card with Tigerair, I get the savings automatically. It's pretty simple. It's very easy to use. It's fast. It's personal. It's a great experience. We've also got recent investments that we've put into personalization. One example is Mezi, which is the AI-powered personal travel assistant. Whilst only available in the US today, and watch this space, one of the great features of Mezi is its dynamic traveler profile, and this allows the traveler profile to be updated based on actual user behavior, allowing agents to offer a more personalized service with every interaction. And customers love recommendations made for them and the recognition that we know them. What might that look like in a corporate travel setting? Well, I guess today you might have a hotel program, it has 6 different hotels on it, you go on there and you choose the hotel you want to stay at. In a more personalized program, perhaps that's where you know an employee's stay preference, maybe you know their food preferences, their favorite things to do, and on that basis when they access that hotel program they'd have a personalized recommendation for you. And you might say, oh, why do we want to personalize to that level? But I think that personalization for travel managers, again, is going to be increasingly important given the loyalty amongst your colleagues is an important ask with the growing millennial population in your companies. The next trend we want to look at is that of customers valuing experiences, and Sydney Airport referenced experience. I thought they're doing a great job both in omnichannel and the way in which they're raising the bar on experiences within the airport. One of the big topics that seems to come out in corporate at the moment is that of bleisure. And bleisure isn't just about keeping employees, and particularly happy— particularly millennials engaged and happy. It's also about other benefits like advertising what a great place to work looks like and encouraging workplace diversity. What might that look like? One thing we know is that emotional affinity is broadcast far and wide given the way employees engage with Social media. A great example of people's love of social media is the hashtag #travel has been used over 308 million times. And if you go and look up #travel, you might find Annie's bucket list. That's the the middle picture there. It's really quite a brilliant picture, isn't it? It's sort of it makes you think, wow, it's a very simple. way to use the technology, but it makes you want to be there. It's an instant emotional connection that that kind of photo can emit, and I think that's where the opportunities come. If you want to go down the path of enabling bleisure, you need to create that emotional connection. It's not enough to think that by allowing a program you're allowing bleisure to thrive. I think you want your employees and your prospective employees to see your program as the ability to experience cultures, to visit famous sites, to share those experiences back with other colleagues via their digital platforms. You want to create a culture that celebrates the diversity such a program delivers. So if you're going to go down the bleisure path, making an emotional connection and making it consistent with your company values is something you want to promote. The last piece we wanted to talk about was that it's easier to lose trust than to gain it. It's something we're probably all very familiar with. And it's really never been easier for a disgruntled customer to be able to amplify their opinions, and those opinions stick. Google are famous for their don't be evil mantra, and in today's rich social media environment, the importance of that philosophy has never been more relevant. When I say overbooked US flight, what image does it conjure up for you? I think we all know the story of David Dao, the pulmonologist passenger on United Express Flight 3411, who was forcibly removed from the plane by aviation security officers. The video of the incident went viral, generated over 4.3 million views. But how many of you know the story of Kerry Drake? No. Now, Drake was informed his mother was facing her final hours and made a dash to the airport. To get to his final destination, Drake would have to contend with a narrow connection window, so when his flight was delayed, he broke down as the prospect of not reaching his mother became a reality. When finally boarding the plane, the flight crew noticed his distress and the pilot radioed ahead to delay his connecting flight. Despite the system challenges such an action would cause and the resultant impact on on-time performance, The plane was held and Drake was able to see his mother that evening before she passed in the morning. It's a great story of going above and beyond for the customer. And the story was picked up by CNN, it was picked up by the Today Show, Huffington Post, a whole range of news outlets. However, if you go to YouTube today and you type in Kerry Drake United Airlines, the top 2 results returned are Shame on You United Airlines And video shows a passenger forcibly removed from a United Airlines plane. The third result is Ellen on United Airlines' latest headlines, and I don't expect that was positive either. Transparency and trust is going to become increasingly important and valuable assets for organisations looking to nurture loyal and strong partnerships in the future. I think for travel managers, the challenge is to think about the type of headline you don't want to wake up to tomorrow. and what you're doing about it today to prevent it. So customer engagement is an area of your business where the landscape has changed markedly in recent years. Digital platforms create tremendous opportunity and also introduce significant potential risks. Hopefully this discussion has stimulated some thoughts you'll have a chance to explore with your esteemed audience over the next day or so, and thank you to CAPA, as always, for your ongoing support. of the travel industry.

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