TCS launches new solutions for airlines
November 5, 2007

Innovation 2.0 focused on delivering "customer delight" for airline passengers

TCS's Travel and Hospitality Innovation Lab has launched a new set of solutions designed specifically to help the airline industry identify and retain high value customers. Named Innovation 2.0 solutions, these offerings will enable leading global travel and hospitality organisations to differentiate themselves, as well as increase their relevancy to an individual customer, in an era of increasing competition and new distribution models.

The core Innovation 2.0 solutions is a vendor-agnostic, SOA-based Travel Service Platform. In a business environment that demands organisational flexibility and adaptability, it enables airlines and hospitality companies to model, simulate, test and execute new business solutions in a shorter time to market.

Other new offerings launched today include:

• An on-demand analytics platform with strong predictive capabilities that helps identify valuable customers using data on client history, travel behavior, passenger miles and revenues. These insights can be translated into customer management initiatives that help maintain loyal and profitable relationships
• Real-time loyalty solution which enables loyalty points to be earned and redeemed in real-time by customers across all touch points
• Travel concierge, which provides a personalised and secure information channel between customers and the airlines for up to date, real-time and relevant communication

"The global travel and hospitality market is fiercely competitive. To meet their business objectives, companies must consistently deliver customer delight and create a rich, personalised travel experience. The Travel and Hospitality Innovation Lab is leading the industry in developing solutions to address these needs and deliver real business value for the industry," said S Ramadorai, chief executive officer and managing director.

"Our innovation efforts are focused on conceptualizing and building new solutions that help global carriers enhance customer experience management. As the airline industry adopts new business models, TCS can play a key role in this transformation with our full services capabilities to help airline companies create customer delight," said N Chandrasekaran, chief operating officer and executive director.

"Innovation 2.0 solutions will help airlines achieve value-based segmentation, launch personalised marketing programs seamlessly across channels, create real-time loyalty programmes to influence customer behaviour across customer life-cycle and make customer relationship management a integral part of the entire travel experience," said G Raghavan, head, travel and hospitality.

This integrated system provides relevant customer information, including bookings, customer profiles and behavior, to automated customer response systems, all relevant customer service agents and airline staff to enable organisations to have a more holistic view of their customers, making client interactions more intelligent and relevant, to increase the customer experience and drive loyalty.

The travel and transportation vertical is emerging as a key vertical for TCS with 4.4 per cent of total revenues of $2.7 billion (at the end of six months of the current fiscal year). It employs 3,000 persons in this vertical and counts British Airways, Qantas, Singapore Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Worldspan, SITA, Hawaiian Airlines amongst others as customers.