In today’s episode of the Conversational Messaging Podcast, Thiagarajan “Thia” Rajagopalan, Founder and CEO of Tripeur, joins Gupshup’s VP Marketing Srinivas Vijayaraghavan to discuss how conversational messaging can massively get rid of customer pain points while increasing a travel brands’ efficiency. Tune in for a conversation about how better communication equates to better brand reputation.

The Changes in Consumer Requirements

COVID has definitely brought massive changes in how people travel, regardless of whether it’s for leisure or business. According to Thia, people demand more information about travel arrangements, places they’re traveling to (restrictions, policies, etc.), and have expectations in terms of the place, hotels, etc. All of these are driven by the fact that people’s regard for safety alongside convenience has become higher. This drives the need for better communication using channels such as WhatsApp.

The Increased Need for Communication

Because people’s priority is safety; communication has become more important than ever. As many traveling transactions are affected by the pandemic, there is also an enormous need to provide consumers with the information. Hence, it is important to provide contactless but reliable communication to consumers.

Thia believes that automating this process through conversational messaging is the best way to optimise operations.

Social media is becoming very common for all the users. The direct connectivity between the service provider and the consumer is only going to accelerate, and it’ll go to the next level.

Thia Rajagopalan

Ensuring Your Brand’s Good Reputation

Before, brands’ reputations used to be completely based on their customers’ offline and real-time experience. However, with the accessibility of technology, the market has become more competitive than the way it used to be. Consumers now assess brands in terms of their online services (e.g. mobile apps performance, etc.). Hence, today, brands should be making an effort to impress the users not only while they are actively transacting with brands but also before and after their transactions. Brands can do this by sending out personalised messages to customers, which Thia believes to have a positive influence on brands’ reputation.