EaseMyTrip: Better conversion and customer experience with WhatsApp, RCS, and SMS

Challenge

With a target audience between the ages of 25 and 40, Indian company EaseMyTrip is always looking for ways to optimize their customer communication and offer the most convenient and innovative experience. In order to achieve this, the team follows a 360 marketing approach – always open-minded to testing and implementing new and innovative channels.

Because of this approach and company mindset, EaseMyTrip is continuously looking to address the following challenges:

Firstly, they are always looking for the right channel to engage their customers with the latest deals and updates, no matter where they are.

Secondly, they want to improve their customer travelling experience by being able to deliver reliable and timely flight notifications to prevent unnecessary customer frustration.

Thirdly, they are always looking to implement new channels that are being adopted by people in India.

To solve all of these challenges and have the ability to implement new ideas to improve their customer journey continuously, they needed a messaging partner that could help them start using new services quickly – one with quick to market solutions.

Solution

In order to address all these challenges, EaseMyTrip started working closely with Infobip in 2019, and has since implemented multiple channels.

The solution to improve EaseMyTrip’s customer communication was multi-fold – WhatsApp Business Platform, SMS, and RCS Business Messaging used over different stages and according to customer preference.

With over 400 million users in India and the ability to support rich media capabilities, WhatsApp was the obvious choice to send pdf e-tickets to their customers conveniently. After the purchase of the ticket is performed on the EaseMyTrip site, their customer receives a WhatsApp message with a pdf e-ticket.

SMS is an established, and one of the most preferred communication channels in India. This is why EaseMyTrip uses Infobip’s platform for campaign creation to share the latest promotional deals with their customer base. The tool allows them to be flexible in both campaign creation and testing different approaches, while the URL tracking feature gives EaseMyTrip insight into their message engagement.

Lastly, Infobip helped EaseMyTrip with sharing time-critical information about flight changes. Whenever a flight is delayed, for example, an SMS containing vital information about it is triggered and sent to the exact target audience affected by this change.

Late in 2020, EaseMyTrip decided to test Rich Communications Services and see the impact the channel would have. After discussing the potential use cases with the team at Infobip, they decided to use the channel to run promotions and get feedback from their customers about traveling post-Covid.

As EaseMyTrip business is a 24/7 service, Infobip’s 24/7 support with local language and local presence ensured all the channels were running smoothly.

Results

EaseMyTrip was able to increase their engagement and improve customer experience with the use of SMS, RCS and WhatsApp in their communication efforts.

SMS helped their customers receive important flight information on time, while WhatsApp played a significant role in improving the customer experience as it proved to be an ideal solution that gave EaseMyTrip customers additional value and truly eased their trips and ticket bookings.

While tapping into the new chat channel, they also addressed the problem they had with their emails containing important flight details not being opened on time. With WhatsApp, the waiting time for customers’ responses dropped to an average of 10 minutes.

Seeing the positive impact WhatsApp has had on their day-to-day business, EaseMyTrip decided to upgrade their customer communication even further. They have developed a chatbot that helps users make new bookings and also receive price alerts. They are also enhancing the chatbot to provide customer support, which will help their customers easily discover their ideal trip.

After sending 5.5 million RCS messages, the new communication channel proved to be a success – compared to email, the open rate was 7% higher and the CTR almost 4x.

The elaborate campaign managed to fulfill multiple goals – resulting in 10 times more surveys filled and a 2.7% higher conversion rate, than a similar email campaign where customers used a promotional code to book their next trip.

The team at EaseMyTrip found excellent value in RCS because of the ability to define multiple customer journeys and enrich them with images and links, while also giving them complete control of the interactions.