Dennis Rijntjes, Daniel Vijge - Deepening Traveler Relationships through CIAM

Yeah, well, happy to see, happy to see everybody still here. We have the great task to be the last presenters today. We've made a sort of an easy presentation, but a lot of the images and not a lot text. So I think that's gonna be helpful. I also work. We have drinks afterwards sponsored by Facebook. I think that's good. Then we probably all enjoy our favorite drinks. Probably know what we like, maybe some short introduction where Euro com we sell train passes. I will get back to that later. Maybe first introduction. This is Daniel. My name is Daniel. Be I'm an it architect.

Let's say euro.com. Yeah. My name is Dennis I'm marketing manager for, for Israel, and Israel is one of our brands. And we'll get back to that a bit later. First short move. I started trip epic. It was just, but our experiences were unforgettable. We were more than just travelers. We were writers of our own stories. Create your own story with Interrail one pass, endless possibilities. So that's what we do. We sell train process to discover year by train. That's basically how it is.

We wanna talk a little bit about how we use customer identity management to deepen the relationship with, with revolution with customers today. I think we can go to the next next slide first to have even more attention. During the last minutes of this meeting, you have a chance to win two winter robot. You can discover 30 countries by train for full months. I think it's quite interesting. The answer to a question that I will ask later is summer in this presentation. I hope you'll list.

You can find our email addresses at the end of the presentation, send us an email with answer and we will do a small raffle and send tickets to you. So what we do, we, we are the official online sales channel for Euro internal passes. Euro is the brand we use in outside of Europe and S the brand we use in Europe. Anybody heard about railing or intro or intro experience?

Oh, wow. That's it's impressive. Cool. That's it's, it's, it's something that exists for a long, long time already and still exists at the moment. We're hundred percent eCommerce company, 88 million turnover in 2060, we're actually owned by the European railways and some fair companies. We have inhouse customer service in reservations in 10 languages. So we really want to be where the customer is and listen to the customer 275,000 customers last year. And it's only the people who bought the bus.

So there, there's probably more people who travel. There are more people who travel. Somebody buys a bus for his family, for example. So there's more travelers, 120 500 employees. And based in small city compared to Paris, Arizona in the Netherlands travelers actually come from all over Europe, all over the world.

I'm sorry, mainly Europe, but a lot of people from the us as well were exploring new regions like Asia at the moment, but also south and Latin America are growing, growing regions for Us. So bit more about the two brands was founded in 72 and basically meant for young people to discover Europe bike train for, then it was only for people under 21. Now it's for, basically for everybody to discover Europe, Euro was founded even before in 59, already as a symbol of the European unification after the war 28 countries are included in Euro pass.

The difference between the 30 and 28 is in the UK and in Macedonia, isn't it? Yeah, those are the two, two missing for I Israel. So it's not only people who buy passers buses.

It's only, it's also the, the travelers, but it's also a huge community that we serve. So a lot of people really wanna be part of the internal community. And these are mines amounts are something we're quite proud of. It's still growing every day of, of course, we're now exploring Snapchat. As you can see, looking at buy faces, not something I'm really into, but a lot of people are nowadays. I think that's, that's good. We meet people where we are. I think that's sort of the, the main thing we always try to do and essential of course, to seamless customer experience.

And then it's important to know we're talking to, to serve the right information and the right message at the right moment in the customer journey. Yeah. So this is sort of the basic customer journey. I think companies use this interesting thing with us is that people buy a pass at a certain point of time, get inspired. They plan the journey, buy the pass after that, they need reservations. For example, if you travel from Amsterdam to Paris, by Tali, you need reservations, but there's more and more trains in Europe where you need reservations for after purchasing.

It actually needs start travel. So it's really long customer journey, which starts with the awareness phase, of course, but, but ends months and months later, quite often. So if you buy a pass, it's fell for 11 months. So it's quite a long period of time, a bit more about how we talk to people and how we get to know people. Thanks. So to create a connection with a customer, we actually have to know, of course the customer, and that means the customer has to identify his or herself to us. After that, we actually use a signup process like a lot of companies do.

And for us, that means that we need to make this as frictionless as possible for a customer. So we provide social sign. We provide localization. We do that on a multitude of platforms that we have both the brands, internal and URL, but also like set reservation platform that we have. And we want to provide the single sign on solution there, but we also have localization with social networks. So where people from Western countries still like to sign in with Facebook or Twitter in China, we have a lot of different networks. We also see that some people are quite ready to give their details to us.

A lot of people are not. So in a checkout, for example, some people are quite comfortable giving all the details, but a lot of people say, no, I don't want that. So for that, we provide a guest account option. So we are not forcing people always to create an account. And when we looked at implementing this, we didn't, we really decided early on that we didn't want to do this ourself.

It's, it's a complicated subject. There's a lot of technology that comes into play a lot of social networks and with 125 people, mostly in customer service, we're actually a small company. So it's not for us that we're an expert in this field. So we decided to power with giga to actually make this possible. So we use giga as an authentication provider, just authentication is complicated. There's the technology side, there's the legal side to it. And as a company, we want to be where the customer is. So we want to keep up to date with all the new developments that are happening in the market.

And partnering with an external company actually helps us in, in doing this. And it also for us as a way to set sort of a micro architecture approach where one system has one single purpose. So with the system that we partnered with giga, we get two sort of separate systems. One you see on the top it's giga is actually providing the authentication management and the other at the bottom is the data store. So what's on the right side is just an example, but we get a Jason document data store in which we can store data about a customer. And there's a lot of data that we can store.

So if someone bought a pass with us, we store that inside this database and each pass is developed in a certain number of countries. And if someone wants to make a reservation, we can actually check if they're alternated to make that reservation also plans itineraries. If people start planning their actual trip, we store that in this database.

And for us, it's actually really handy to do that, cuz the way that it's set up, it allows us to, from our website to directly query this database, without having to worry about the, the technical authentication, cuz we know that the external platform actually takes care of that. So once we store all this, this data inside this platform, we collect a lot of data from a customer, actually customer gifts that to us ourself. And at that point we can do a lot of nice stuff. And then talk about that. Yeah. So a bit about the future customer journey.

We see we've actually started working on that already, but yeah, basic thing we want to be where the customer is because there's such a long period of time between buying a bus or even playing or generat and then buying a bus and then actually traveling. It's really important that we give the right information at the right moment. And I like the remark about booking. We just heard that they send like two email for three days after you actually book something, book.com there's of course a risk. We also see there's a risk we wanna avoid. I think it really starts with listening.

We really asking people what they like. So we really do also with the help of gig and gig implementation, what issue next destination, which cities in Italy, for example, would you like to go? We know if people travel first class or second class, we know if they're a family or if they're 21 and backpackers or if they're maybe seniors who travel by train. So starts with listening to the customer who are we talking to and then sending the right messages. And we wanna do it of course, throughout the whole customer journey.

So the most important part of where it starts with you see sort of screenshot of the playing tool we have on our website is giving people the opportunity to actually plan their trip. Sounds easy. But most of the time you only plan point to point tickets from Amsterdam to Paris in our case this morning. But if you plan trip throughout Europe in this case, Spain and Portugal, but you can travel basically anywhere with this past almost it's quite a job to schedule the trip and to plan the trip, let alone, if you travel with six, seven friends, for example, with your backpack.

So we have plan tools for that. We ask people where they want to go. We help them with the correct information. We also inspire them to plan their next trip or their dream trip. So if we know people who visited France go to Italy typically, and that's the second step we can help them already. We're suggesting that planning tools are discussed and we do this pre-purchase but also post purchase.

So also if somebody already bought inform them before they travel a few days before they travel, not six times, but once with some pre pre-trip info about the destinations, the cities where they're traveling. Also for example, with voucher, city discounts and insurance, maybe if somebody needs it and we connected the reservations like Danielle discussed the plant trips, give a lot of data about intention. So we continuously learn about people, how they wanna travel.

I mean, sometimes we also don't understand why. For example, Sweden is the number one country where people travel or Denmark it's it's, it's it's differs per month. So we learn a lot from the customers and why they do so. And we synchronize data between different systems. For example, we use, we use MailChimp as an email system.

So MailChimp uses data from giga, but also the other way around, if we do something with email, we ask something in an email, we can also get it back into giga, to still have one central database to store the data again, back to contacting the customers at the right time with the right personal information, but also offers with certain discounts coupons. For example, we have a promo right now, 15% discount and interval passes. So we know who to send an email. For example, at the moment we only have a website, basically two Euro and integral. Both are both for our websites.

We're working on an app, our pass. So somebody who wins, don't be shocked, receive a paper pass. We still have a paper ticket. You have to really bring to the train. We're working on E ticket, which is not easy because we work with so many different railways in Europe. So there's a lot of authentication going on there.

It's, it's quite a hard to project. We will have an EPAs in the end and then we will have an app we need to app to, to show to the, to the people in the train. But then we also feel that somebody should be able to do the same on the website as, as he can or will do in the app, for example. So it's also multi plus platform idea customers always in. I know it sounds easy, but I think also the whole discussion about GDPR.

Of course, we're also looking in that incident. We have lawyers external at the moment still, but we feel it all starts with helping people out basically. And I think that that will also get us to the next level. And it's also why we don't have to be afraid about this new TD. I think that's the story for, for today. I think the main, the main, the main part to remember is that we really see many customers, but the bigger, bigger community.

And I think the, the chance for the brands in our case is in the community and get to know people even better to give them the right information at the right right time Question. I have another slides, so don't work away because we can still win the bright. So you said that GI is a providing you the data store where you're keeping all the user information. So is that also where, when they're planning their trips, all that information is store in GI and not on your Yes.

So that is, that is a central platform in which we store all data that is related to a customer server at the moment, someone is planning a trip or they have made a reservation. So we know that they're in a certain trade that is stored in one central platform. So that's gig in this case Number question. Yeah. Okay. Hi. So you say MUN is very important and most travelers don't travel alone. How do you deal with that in case family? How do you see the relationship between people that travel together SIS or have mind? How is that handle? Yeah.

So at the moment we are, and that's a huge opportunity, but also something we have to work on at the moment. We really mainly talk to people who purchased the past. So the next that's also because we only need that data to send the invoice and to send the past to on social. For example, we do see, we talk to more people, multiple people. We talk to the whole group for example, but that's not aligned at the moment.

So that's, that's, it's a big, big chance and stuff for future. Thanks. I have to expand the bit on that. So we do see that developing in the future. So our platform where we store all the data, the data store itself, currently it's linked to one customer. We decided not to store this travel diary or itinerary directly with the customer, but put it in, let's say an external object so that we can link an itinerary to multiple travelers. So it is already celebrate a way that we can expand it.

That that's indeed, like you said, if there is a family or group of friends who want to travel together, that they can do that. And that maybe there is one main account holder who can add the information and the others can view it. Or if there is permission that each can added that information, but yeah, for us, that's, that's a future development that we're looking into. Hi. Yeah.

So kind, I traveled with you guys in the summer. That's really nice. It's not that identity or any question. It's just that one of the slides I left at it's 88 million turnover and two 70 500,000 customers. It equals like something like 320 euros. So I'm just trying to see, is that, do you have repeated people traveling in the, in the, in the journey? So do you have people repeating? It's like 180, so global pass. Yeah. And then you have 320 euros per customer. Yeah.

And then, so do you also earn money from the trail companies or I think it started out as being sort of once I've been working for the company for six months now, like a once in a lifetime opportunity, that's sort of how it started out. You know, you do this once in your life, you never forget about it.

We, people still don't forget about it. We do see people coming back more and more often, especially for, because yeah, people for integral are already in Europe. So it's sort of easy to start traveling for Europe. We see people mainly from the us Australia still have to buy a plane ticket to come to Europe and then start traveling.

So it's, it's a different kind of target group next to the, the passes where you can, that you can use to discover the whole Europe also sell one country passes. So you can also buy bypass, only travel in Italy or only in Spain or only in the Netherland. So hope a little bit.

It's it's, it's sort of we to traveling more to people traveling more and more often. Okay. The other one is because you have a community, do you have like a, like not, not ticketing, but an app to say who is Interrailing and then you could kind of find buddies or Yeah, no, but actually we're like, I sort of mentioned, we are working on, on an app. Let's say the MVP of an app would be the E ticket because we really need an need ticket. We we'll understand that it's really necessary, but we see many more opportunities. Indeed.

The next phases, basically the whole engagement thing to connect people like, Hey, we're in the same train. Let's talk because we, we are both part of this community in the past. We've been talking about maybe a Euro Tinder. So you never know It's called. Yeah. Thank you. You can send me an invoice for it. Good question. And full disclosure from January, you are discussing your roadmap items around sort of dedicated administration relationships and as a roadmap person, is that something you're gonna have to custom build or is that something you're gonna get as part of the platform?

Like I say, full disclosure from January. Yeah.

So, so which group roadmap were you'd Referring to the dedicated administration? So like the, the, you know, group, group management group, group management, The group management is something that probably we have to build ourselves. So right now we store objects in the data store that only the account board can access. If we want to make something that a group can access, that would be something that we would have to build done.

The, the authentication of the multiple accounts comes into play. So that's something that we have to middle where we are in actually have that. Okay. Great. Well that concludes today. Thank you very much. You've got one more important slide. Here's the question here? The question and how many countries can you travel with an intro pass? And we've mentioned it a couple times now you're telling it to everybody because we thought about how can we do this first?

You know, we didn't know what you can do is contact contact sales on LinkedIn, or send us a quick email with the answer. We'll do an almost raffle with a lawyer if necessary and, and send the two passes to the quick. So thank.