Cargo Chat: Demmer of cargo.one talks digital booking in a multichannel world

Growth in digital bookings has accelerated rapidly since 2020, as platforms see e-booking volumes triple or even quadruple year over year. Alongside that growth, major digital booking platforms are competing to capture their share of the rapidly expanding market by improving their product offerings and functionality. Increasingly, technology providers are also adding on capabilities such as artificial intelligence tools and data analytics to drive more carriers to their platforms. Germany-based cargo.one, a leader in the digital booking space, strengthened its own platform with the late 2021 launch of its cargo.one360 data product for carriers. Air Cargo World spoke with Simson Demmer, senior director of airline products at the company, to learn how platforms are seeking to capture the growing digital booking market and bolstering their own competitive edge with data analytics capabilities. [caption id="attachment_99426" align="alignright" width="454"] Simson Demmer, senior director of airline products, cargo.one[/caption] Air Cargo World: Digital booking is an increasingly competitive market. There are stand-alone platforms available, and some freight forwarders are launching their own platforms while some airlines are opting to build up their own capabilities. How do you expect the digital booking market to develop in the future? Will data offerings provide a competitive edge for platforms? Simson Demmer: I think we cemented our role in driving and maybe developing this future. But ultimately, the place that will drive the future of digital sales, it’s for airlines to be where their customers are. And for customers to choose the best fit, the most convenient option, to transact for their business. Invariably that means a version of a multichannel world. But I don’t think, necessarily a multichannel world where everyone has the same setup. We see this now. We have airlines that have invested in their own digital channel and continue to invest very significantly, and they still partner with us, because they want to profit from our expertise, because they want to reach customers that aren’t currently transacting or working with them, but also because they want to be present for their customers that are on cargo.one. Others are entirely forgoing the investment into their own digital sales channel and only go through platforms, or potentially other connection options. Building your own platform is very expensive, and you need special skills in user experience design and the continuous commitment to develop and invest, because otherwise it stalls, and other developments go away. It is a multichannel world, and it will still be this rapid access to bookers and to airlines, and the quality of the user journey where a platform like cargo.one will offer acceleration and the cost benefit to airlines and partners compared to the other options. To your last point, analytics and data products are critical, especially for airlines to steer and improve their offers across channels, not just in the digital channel. For the near future, at least, the biggest competitive advantage will come from offering customers the full spectrum of digital benefits and to have a great deal to offer in the first place. ACW: Your analytics solution cargo.one360 was launched in November 2021. Can you speak to the use cases for the data and benchmarks that are available to the carriers on your platform? SD: Cargo.one360 is our real-time data analytics solution to help carriers gain access to their digital sales data and to optimize their offering. It helps build feedback loops in the organization to react to market dynamics, to act on learnings in what you see. And that takes different forms depending on where carriers are in the digital journey, but also based on the teams that are using cargo.one. Because it’s not just for one team, it’s for everyone — from revenue management to sales to IT to even customer service. To give you an example, it can be something as simple as very foundational work, and how we manage flights and how business rules are set within the organization to optimize show rate, which is one of the key metrics on cargo.one360 and is quite important in digital sales. Another use case is the development of new features and products. If you can see how air waybill errors impact customer attrition or how API response times have a negative effect on customer experience and customer choice behavior, you can act upon that and build solutions to help, and the air waybill is an example of that. And then finally, I think it does power — and this comes back to where an airline is in its organizational transformation and digital journey — these more advanced use cases where cargo.one360’s real-time data, and especially benchmarks, serve as an input to the revenue management, the offer design and the pricing processes. … We even have automated data exchanges set up that then maybe also feed the internal business intelligence. ACW: Since you launched the data product, several airlines have announced joining your platform. What is the integration process like when you’re onboarding a new carrier’s data for benchmarking? How does that process vary depending on where the carrier is in their innovation process? SD: We now have a dedicated team that manages these integrations, and have done for a while. We’ve done integrations of all shapes and sizes, from ones with four years of history and experience to even the earliest ones that we’ve done. It now takes four weeks to run an airline integration from the staff development to the first booking. Usually, it takes six to eight weeks, but we’ve done it as fast as four. With the go-live, with the first booking, airlines get access to their performance data in real time, and it allows them to immediately begin to understand their offer and begin to tune the dials. We run a beta process with the launch normally, where very quickly you see in this data feedback loop that something isn’t working, there’s a setting somewhere that’s not right, etc. It’s this sort of very quick learning process that then continues at different stages. If you’re a carrier that has everything perfect, and you’re just tuning your revenue management policies, that’s different than if you find out that you have organizational change processes in stations because some teams aren’t managing the flights the way that you want them to, to make them digitally accessible. The second piece is the benchmarking around customer experience and booking experience. For example, the speed of API responses, or the auto-confirmation rate, which really impacts the forwarder, or the customer booking experience. They become available very quickly as well, usually within a couple of hours, or at most a day, after a carrier has gone live on cargo.one. That depends on an airline’s offer volume. Carriers, on the performance data on some of these benchmarks, can benefit from the get-go. We find it’s very critical because it gives you an immediate feedback loop to improve the other benchmarks then, the ones where, for instance, there is a pricing component — they only become available when all the compliance criteria for those benchmarks are met, for example, criteria on data volume, or on time frame. In the fastest instance that can be a week, but to really get a full picture on those, it’s usually at least a month for enough data to accrue and to meet all the compliance hurdles for those benchmarks to become available.

Cargo Chat: Demmer of cargo.one talks digital booking in a multichannel world

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