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- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corazon.com brand welcome to the Digital Executive. Today's guest is Andrew Harrison Chin. Andrew Harrison Chin is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dragon Pass where he leads global brand communications and thought leadership for the travel and lifestyle platform. Dragon Pass works with airports, financial institutions and travel providers worldwide to improve how people move through and experience journeys from airport lounges to digital loyalty and access services. Before becoming Chief Marketing Officer, Andrew served as Dragon Pass as a global Managing Director and CEO overseeing international growth, commercial strategy and market expansion across multiple regions. His professional background spans communications, investment and retail banking, giving him a broad perspective on consumer trust behavior and how technology reshapes service led industries at scale. Well, good afternoon Andrew. Welcome to the show.
- [01:16]
B
Good afternoon Brian. It's great to be here. Thank you.
- [01:19]
A
Absolutely, my friend, I appreciate it. You're in London in England, the uk. I am in Kansas City. So just a six hour difference but I appreciate you navigating all the time zones, calendars, et cetera to get here. So thank you Andrew. Absolutely. I'm going to jump into your first question here. You've led Dragon Pass as CEO, Global Managing Director and now the Chief Marketing Officer. How has that end to end leadership perspective shaped the way you think about brand growth and customer trust?
- [01:50]
B
Yeah, so I was really privileged in the early days, Brian, to wear many hats. So as a small organization starting out with very little, I wore a hat of hr, customer support, operations, product sales, pretty much everything. So it allowed me to understand the challenges that each department has and then how you weave those needs and interests together. Right. And, and in building a global brand, it's important to note as well that we're very fortunate enough to have some really good competition in the market. So we when you're number two, you've got to work harder, you've got to work smarter, faster, more flexibly. And our potential clients and customers at the time were actually our greatest asset. So we went out and we just listened. We said what do you want? What do people like? Where they felt the gaps were, where there was room for improvement. And that feedback was actually our catalyst for innovation which inevitably led us to co create solutions that tackled both our client and our customer pain points and that allowed us really to scale up as a brand. And traditionally we white labeled. So our brand sat behind these really large behemoths in the world, you know, the likes of Visa, MasterCard, Barclays bank across the hundred countries that we're now in. But their support obviously in the co creation of solutions to offer customer centric products really helps us to grow and scale. We've also traditionally been a brand associated with the underdog, someone who's willing to go above and beyond to win. And that resonates really well with, with obviously many people in the market. And that's really translated the way in which our brand has chosen to innovate. The end to end leadership perspective, as you ask about there, from a brand growth and customer trust perspective, it's really understanding the interests of the end to end both internally and externally and then how we deliver quality solutions and relevant solutions off the back of that.
- [03:39]
A
Thank you, really appreciate that. And I love how you talked about, you know, you've held many roles early on from hr, et cetera, but you really learned how to weave these different roles departments together, understanding the business better, but also of course bringing together a strong synergistic culture there. What I really took away here is you really listened intently to your customers. It allowed you to provide that great service that you're able to scale now. And gosh, I think you said 100 countries, so that's amazing. I appreciate that, thank you. So Andrew, Dragon Pass works with airports, financial institutions and travel providers worldwide. What are the biggest friction points in the modern travel journey that technology can realistically solve today?
- [04:24]
B
Yeah, it's a good question. I would probably simplify it to two things, transparency on one end and fragmentation on the other. Let's start with the beginning of a customer's journey. Right? So our data actually shows that only 27% of customers know the extent of the benefits available to them. And this is either because these benefits are not communicated well enough by the end user by the client, or a customer actually doesn't know how to access the benefits. So for us it was really leading with a digital first approach. And that means we can consolidate all of these benefits into one place, which is usually via apps we create or via APIs that we create for our clients and we API into their environment. And then if the client wants, we can use data sets to present the most relevant products to the customers at the right time, to the most relevant customers. And this allows the clients to continuously evolve and refresh their propositions. Because as we know, the world is constantly changing, customer needs are constantly changing. So for us, it's how we support clients and customers on being able to engage better with the solutions. And obviously, ideally it leads to a stronger NPS score as well for our clients. And so that's really on the client side is that relevance, that differentiation, transparency, simplicity and access. But then on the supply side, it's been an incredible journey for us because there are varying degrees of technology globally, particularly you take a look at airports, right? Some of them are really, really antiquated legacy systems. Some have built these slick in house systems. But inevitably this technology is fragmented and inconsistent. So what we do is we consolidate all of this into one platform and then we present it in a way that is easy to digest. And what we found both from a partner and a client perspective is sort of that simplification of complexity has really, really, really resonated. During COVID we decided we were going to aggregate fast track lanes around the world. No one had actually done this at scale before. And we realized why is there are nine different ways in which you can consume language this product, from static codes to APIs. So our platform consumes this complexity and it simplifies it through this consistent user experience that we talked about. But then in addition to that, you need to be flexible on your monitoring systems in case someone sporadically decides to update their API certificates or runs out of code. So the biggest friction points in modern travel journey that technology can realistically solve today is how you give transparency of what is available, easy access to consume it, and then actually how you connect all those fragmented environments into a simplified place and you build robustness for the unseen amidst the incredibly complex and fragmented environments. It's critical to ensure that when a customer goes to use a service that there is that continuity of service and obviously thus brand reputation too.
- [07:19]
A
Thank you, I appreciate that. Breaking it down, transparency and fragmentation. You talked about consolidating, making the customer experience, the user experience much easier, simpler, convenient place.
- [07:31]
B
Right.
- [07:32]
A
You talked about consolidation, also talked about the flexibility, the continuity, the reliability, but also a statistics I didn't even know about. You mentioned only 27% of customers know the benefits they can participate in. And so you're making that better so they can take full advantage. And I think that's great. You're going the extra mile for the customer, which is really amazing from my standpoint. I talk a lot about customer experience here, so. Thank you. Andrew, loyalty programs are evolving beyond break. Excuse me, beyond points and perks. How do you see the economics of loyalty changing as access, comfort and personalization become more valuable than discounts?
- [08:13]
B
Yeah, yeah, this, this is actually the question that drives us as a business not only keeping benefits relevant, but solving for that dichotomy. Between the customer experience and usage, right. The economics that you talk about there, the more you use something, the more expensive on a cost line it becomes, right. And the harder it is generally for a client to offer. So what we've been doing is how trying to understand a, the relevance of solutions, how we connect supply chain to the demand and how we create scalable relevant solutions. If I go into recently, we've conducted a global loyalty index to understand what actually makes people loyal. So let's start with the loyalty conundrum there. What is it that makes people loyal? And you'd be surprised to hear that often it's the unsexy stuff that really drives the highest value in loyalty per se. Not necessarily engagement, but loyalty, and that's operations and customer support. So when you have a question or something goes wrong, you need to have the ability to get an answer that quickly resolves your query and ideally puts you in the same or better position than prior to your query and with a higher cost to serve globally. This is becoming increasingly difficult for companies, which is why for us, our priority was actually mixing technology with those customer support agents to help anticipate and resolve in many instances and of course, where possible, the issues prior to engagement if needed. But that being said, through the loyalty, and it's actually found that personalization, as you've touched on there, Brian, is very closely behind. It's the ability for companies to understand what perks are relevant, as we touched on earlier, and at what time do they need to be engaging with those customers with those solutions to make sure that the consumer is going to engage and consume them? And that's actually where a lot of our investment is going in at the moment, is how do we use data sets to synthesize these complex supply chains and data sets and present customers with solutions that they love and they want to frequently use. Right. So we also work with clients then to understand their commercial models. Right. Because you talk about the economics of both loyalty and how you balance. That is, we want to understand their commercial models and how we can present this in a way that drives a better holistic outcome for clients and customers alike. Right. When, when the tide rises, all ships rise together, as they say. And an example of this is in our loyalty index. We found that 70% of customers, right, 70% of customers had been with their banks for over 10 years, so they would consider themselves really loyal. But when we looked into it, it was actually inertia that was driving this. Only 26% of those customers actually kept their money with their banks. So they were actually costing banks more than they were actually driving through commercial outputs. So what we said is okay, well how do we help you monetize these customers? How do we reward the right behaviors? So we work with banks to understand what offers do we reward for spend. For example, if they spend abroad, they make money. So how do we create spend based rewards? Or how do we start to create minimum deposits rewards? So when you've got a minimum deposit in your bank, actually you get access to a plethora of rewards. And then how do we start to work with supply chains to source discounts that drive engagement for them and cheaper solutions for our clients as well. So the economics really of loyalty, access, comfort and personalization is really how you balance that customer experience with something that is relevant that clients and customers can afford. If that makes sense.
- [11:43]
A
Absolutely. No, I really appreciate that you talked about solving between the customer experience and the usage. How do you connect the supply chain to this demand? And basically kind of paraphrasing what you said is what makes people loyal is that operations, the customer support. Right. And a close second is personalization and you help dial that in with the help of AI. Obviously today we have a lot of that prevalent in everything that we do. So I really appreciate your insights.
- [12:13]
B
Yeah, also having and sorry Brian, just go ahead. A good product, naturally you need to have a good product. But it's really, as I said, the unsexy stuff that we found really drives that loyalty. At your time of need, how are you there for a customer? How do you feed those inquiries, those challenges back to create a better solution and a better customer experience as you touched on earlier?
- [12:34]
A
Absolutely. Thank you so much Andrew. Last question of the day as we look ahead. How will data, digital identity and seamless access redefine the passenger experience over, over the next decade? And what should travel brands be investing in now?
- [12:50]
B
Yeah, it's again another very good question, Brian. I think that first of all let's start with the basics, right, like the must haves. So naturally robust cyber and infrastructure security standards that cater to regional requirements is a must, right? So for example we have data hosting in Saudi, in China, in India and then you complying with GDPR from a UK and a European perspective. And naturally there's other requirements across many, many other regions. So doing the basics right is absolutely critical and we've seen over the last, well particularly 12 months, you know, these, these large hacks where customers data have been shared wider afield which has damaged many of the brands who've been affected. And naturally customers want to trust you and, and they want to feel protect and serve in terms of that data is making sure that you look after it. And what we again found through the loyalty index was that when we asked customers, would you be open to sharing your data? Majority of them said no. When we said to them, if we gave you something to share your data, would you be open to it? And again, majority of them actually said yes, we would. As long as it was looked after, it was trusted, and I knew what you were going to do with that data. Then naturally, bridging tech and customer support agents is critical. As we previously discussed. How do you make sure that your customers, when they have issues are addressed instantaneously or you're anticipating them? Right. Because things are naturally always going to go wrong in any business. Right. So making sure you've got a robust plan to cater when that does happen is critical. Then from what we're doing at the moment is refining your traditional data models, you know, that is absolutely paramount. How do you use your data to drive better customer experience, to drive better commercial outputs, to drive better customer propositions? And that ability to capture, to process and to segment again with the right infrastructure in place is critical as well. And this is where we're investing a lot at the moment. So, you know, the ability to then vectorize our data in order for it to empower AI in the most efficient way. And for us, you know, this opens up the ability for consumers to be able to talk to their data and data, to be able to talk back to them in a way that doesn't break the bank through to computational processing. Right. And what this basically means is consumers can have instant personalized recommendations that predictive service, real time problem resolution, all the things that we've talked about here in a way that is simple and in your palm digitally, which is absolutely critical. And then if we bridge the back to the front end, what we've seen is investment in API ecosystems, that flexibility and platform integrations. People don't always work in one way. So if you can start to create relatively agnostic solutions, not to get too technical here, that provides flexibility in which brands and consumers can consume those experiences in a way that is convenient to them that is absolutely critical. And naturally, mobile first experiences, along with payment innovation and embedded finances is a must. Right. You touched on it, you know, Brian, earlier in making the customer experience as relevant and seamless as possible is really paramount to the success of all of these brands. Right. As well as the ability to anticipate the needs and to reward the right behaviors and naturally predictive models can help you too if brands are looking to invest in these particular areas but where there are investment constraints. My personal favorite thing and it it's perhaps a bit old school here is just get out there and speak to your customers and your clients right? Just understand what are their pain points. Track NPS if you can watch their behaviors because often what a customer says and what a customer does are two very different things. Understand where there is an opportunity to refine that customer experience to make their lives easier to innovate in ways that actually you're anticipating their needs. So over the next decade that's truly where we believe that travel brands should be investing now is how do you make it as seamless as possible for customers with relevant solutions at the right times and when things go wrong, there's a quick and effortless resolution for them.
- [17:01]
A
That's awesome. And the big message I'm going to take away, I just tell you right now is really loving on your customer and I think that's awesome. Really do but just a few things here I wanted to highlight that you said is getting the basics right, fundamentals that strong robust infrastructure, security compliance, et cetera, treating the customers as priority, ensuring that top level support and of course using data to drive better customer experience and then leveraging technology mobile first AI to better provide that better customers experience, service, personalization and even resolutions in this case. So I appreciate that Andrew, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
- [17:40]
B
Yeah, thank you so much Brian, really appreciate your time.
- [17:43]
A
Bye for now.