Manish Amin, CTO, Yatra Online was faced with the challenge of coming up with a mobile application that would be customized according to the make of the phone. Explore how he decided whether to outsource or build in-house capabilities for developing the application.
Summary:
Manish Amin, CTO, Yatra Online was faced with the challenge of coming up with a mobile application that would be customized according to the make of the phone. Explore how he decided whether to outsource or build in-house capabilities for developing the application.
Highlights:
Reader ROI:
Build in-house or outsourceLoyalty isn’t the strong suit of the Indian online travel consumer. According to a 2010 iXigo-INSEAD survey, 61 percent of travelers aren’t faithful to one online travel agent (OTA) – they’re too busy looking for the best deal. That’s bad news for Yatra Online, but the company isn’t letting that bog them down because they have a plan. They’re going to follow consumers wherever they go, on whatever medium they choose. Yatra Online provides its customers with information and a booking facility for air travel, hotels, buses and car rentals across 5,000 cities around the globe. In an early bid to follow its customers on their mobiles, Yatra initially put out a basic mCommerce application: a plain-vanilla extension of its website, which offered basic facilities like booking. But if Yatra wanted to keep customers coming to them, they knew they were going to have to do better.
We believe that there is going to be an entire generation of young adults who are going to skip the PC and laptops and use the mobile as their preferred endpoint.
They decided to create an enhanced version of their mobile app. But the decision was preceded by a larger, more strategic move. For years, the company had watched as millions of Indians flocked to mobile stores, creating one of the greatest mobile growth-markets in the world. With over 621 million mobile subscribers, the advent of 3G and a telecom price war that drove down prices to new lows, Yatra knew the mobile platform just couldn’t be ignored. “We’ve realized clearly that nothing is bigger than the mobile. We believe that there is going to be an entire generation of young adults who are going to skip the PC and laptops and use the mobile as their preferred endpoint,” says Manish Amin, co-founder and CTO, Yatra. That’s when they decided that it was time to really invest in the platform, a move that is still not common among Indian enterprises. The importance of the mobile space and the constant innovation needed to make it user-friendly, made it too critical to be left to a third party. So while its first mobile attempt was developed by an outside party, its new avatar, Yatra was convinced, needed to be made in-house. “Today, we have in-house capabilities for J2ME, WAP and the Blackberry,” says Amin. “What we don’t have is expertise on the iPhone and the Android but getting that is an expense that barely touches six digits.” It was a bold, strategic move (Makemytrip and Cleartrip, for instance, have both outsourced their mobile solution) and it resulted in a new mobile offering (developed using a J2ME client application) that can run on any Java-enabled handset – covering upwards of 95 percent of all handsets. Today, all the offers available on the company’s website, including Yatra miles, promotion codes, and discounts, among others, are available on the new application in addition to the old search and booking functions. All a user needs to do is SMS ‘Yatra’ to 51818 to get a WAP link to download the application. But unlike internal-facing mobile applications that are more popular with Indian CIOs, Yatra’s external audience was harder to please. The application needed to be intuitive and fit snugly with user phones – no matter which phone. The navigation and exit buttons, for example, on a Motorola phone are on the opposite sides of where they are located on a Nokia phone. And memory sizes differ from phone to phone. “We are not approaching this like other app providers who have one large app and a small app. We wanted to make sure that we sent the one best-suited app to a customer’s handset,” says Manish Amin, CTO, Yatra. That’s when they a hit a standardization roadblock: how do you customize customer experience across thousands of phone models? The trick, they found out, lay in identifying a device by the header information that accompanies an SMS request. They then send that information to an Open Source community called WURFL, which has a device description repository. Based on that information, an application is selected that best suits a ‘family’ of phones. (OEMs generally have lead devices, so, for example, Nokia’s 6100 model functions as a lead device for 20-odd phones in that family. Which means that if an application works on that model it will for the rest in that family.) Today, when Yatra gets a message requesting an application download, they send the header information to WURFL, which returns essential parameters like a model number, its screen resolution, and the key codes for the cancel key, among others. And then sends out the appropriate application. “We have to maintain multiple copies of the application, but it’s worth the effort in terms of customer experience,” says Amin. Another challenge was finding a way to ensure that customers didn’t have to key in multiple pieces of information every time they wanted to book a ticket, for instance. One option to make it easier for users was to store all that information on Yatra’s servers – but that could end up making customers uncomfortable. So, Amin and team, decided to use the phone’s local storage to maintain information like a billing address. “Once keyed in, all a customer had to do the next time is select it from a drop down,” says Amin. The downloaded application can store information for up to 25 travelers and five credit card details – but for security reasons it doesn’t store the expiry date or the CVV. It also uses local memory to let customers remember their preferred search parameters like airlines, flying times, refunds, non-stop flights, etcetera. Yet, the app, says Amin, is designed to ensure minimum scrolling.
We believe that there is going to be an entire generation of young adults who are going to skip the PC and laptops and use the mobile as their preferred endpoint.
The app isn’t only for travelers, says Amin. It comes with a currency converter and flight schedule tracker. “So even if you are just going to pick up someone at the airport, you can use it to check their flight’s status,” says Amin. It took a dedicated team just under two-and-a-half months – from concept to testing – to develop the (less than 200 kb) app. The cost of building in-house expertise and creating the application is hard to estimate, says Amin. But ROI isn’t a focus area, he says. “We are gearing up for the big wave and we will definitely see demand increasing with 3G coming in,” he says, justifying the investment. It’s a demand they intend to stay ahead of. Amin says that Yatra is currently in the process of launching a ‘tour guide’ application, which will guide a user to the closest restaurant, night club, or metro station complete with fare charts, depending on their location. “We have a proof-of-concept for Delhi and aim to launch it by the Commonwealth Games,” says Amin.Work is also in progress to extend the travel guide as a ‘hotel companion’ for the 4,000-odd hotels Yatra works with. By the time that’s done, hotels that tie up with Yatra can have an application dedicated to themselves. Potential customers could then have all the information they need about that hotel plus the places around the hotel, how to visit them, down to how to order a cab. “Starting with the top 10 to 15 cities. And after a study of the interest in the application and the traffic we generate, we will scale it up,” says Amin. And with the advent of 3G, they also plan to push out relevant content, like videos. “Our backend is ready for that already,” says Amin. And so is Yatra.
