I have been practicing and preaching UX for the last 19 years across large and small organizations. I have had the fortune of working with organizations focussed on delivering exceptional experiences to the end user and delivered some innovative products across the globe. Luckily today, most organizations understand the relevance of crafting the right user experience and seem to be investing in the practice to make life easy for your product, sales, after-sales and support teams.
User experience has been known to solve every kind of internal as well as external problems that hinder business growth effectively, so what is the new problem that I have found after 19 years of working on multiple programs that I am excited about.
The Problem is centered on making the life of revenue and distribution managers simpler. To give more context, revenue and distribution managers are at the center of a hyper competitive yet growing travel industry where they have the responsibility of generating more revenue every day, and both outsell their competitors and generate more revenue for their organization.
My new organization, RateGain, works with revenue managers, distribution and marketing managers with insights and distribution technologies to maximize the revenue.
The leadership drives this exciting journey at RateGain, which is focused on redefining the current way of working for revenue and distribution managers to help them with clear actions and make the right decisions.
I always thought that hospitality and travel extremely process driven industries because they have been running massive operations to perfection for decades. Therefore, I had initial apprehensions about how welcoming the team would be to a UX preacher trying to change the way systems work.
However, the response at RateGain has been nothing short of overwhelming. I am working with product managers and account managers who are pulling me from one meeting to another to help redesign the experience for the industry. My interaction with them has been extremely productive, with each stakeholder contributing and being forthcoming about issues, areas of improvement helping me understand customer touch points, what are they feeling, their expectations and their challenges.
The work culture at RateGain allows easy cross-functional collaboration, and I am at the centre of this insightful exchange, with most stakeholders warming up to design thinking fairly quickly. Just like any other forward looking organization, you will now see RateGain’s boardroom walls plastered with User stories that we as a team have developed. We are now making the experience a lot better.
The start of creating a new experience has been smooth, and I am hoping the end would be spectacular. Watch out this space more as we go into detail of how are we changing the game at RateGain with User Experience.
About the Author
Gaurav Lal
Senior Vice President – Product Design
RateGain