Ixigo — Capturing the moment with empathy
Founded in 2006 by Two IITians who quit their high-paying jobs, Ixigo.com has come a long way. In this journey of 15 years, they have transitioned from an aggregator to a marketplace to an online travel agency now.
In these 15 years, multiple things have changed-business models, products, people, and a lot of other things. However, they still have not changed two pillars of their value system-empathy and making the most out of the moment.
In this article, we will take you through few examples of how Ixigo excels at capturing the moment and being empathetic.
Aapda mai Avsar (Opportunity in Adversity)
COVID19 had a severe impact on almost all sectors barring a few like Edtech (since online learning was at its peak), but it impacted the travel industry like none other.
This is not just because the future business (bookings etc.) was doomed but also due to numerous refunds being sought for advance bookings done previously for the future which will not see the light of the day due to curbs, lockdowns, etc.
Unlike many others, Ixigo was empathetic to their customers and initiated refunds for everyone who sought them. Even when they did not get a back refund from a service provider (let’s say an airline).
The extent of customer empathy was such that one weekend their prepaid account (which they used for refunds) was out of money only to be recharged the next Monday.
They crowd-sourced about 40 Lakhs from Ixigems (that’s how they call their employees) for the weekend refunds and refunded to the employees the next Monday once they could recharge from their payment/banking partners.
A customer’s validation is the most supreme validation, citing one here:
While all this was happening, it was important to generate at-least some business to keep the ship floating and more importantly to still have some traffic on their website.
Due to different protocols by different states and countries, Ixigo became an information aggregator with its own COVID dashboard to provide all information at one place. They in-fact improved the performance of their chatbot (a.k.a Tara) so that it could handle 90% of the queries by itself.
They also sold insurance on their website and generated ad-based revenue, all this helped them to salvage a decent chunk of the traffic.
That’s what we call Apda mai Avsar, woh bhi pyar se.
Hum sath sath hai (We are in it together)
As an impact of COVID19, two of the leading travel companies in India laid off about 350 and 400 employees respectively. However, Ixigo, even after being from the same space, did not lay off a single employee.
They had a 6-month runway when the lockdown hit, they openly communicated the challenges to both sides (to investors and to employees) and their contingency plans for the next 6 months. They lay tremendous focus on culture, for them firing and re-hiring (when the business will come back) would have been detrimental to their company’s culture.
This open communication helped instill a feeling of oneness in their employees and many employees took on additional responsibilities (eg. half of the team was doing customer support due to an exponential rise in customer queries). Some took a voluntary pay cut, the founders did not withdraw any salary, and much more.
Now when the business is back (Rather a great bounce-back, courtesy, revenge travel), salaries have been rolled back.
That’s the strength of Ixigo’s culture, survived the biggest pandemic without any layoffs.
Pyar Bantte Chalo (Keep distributing love and empathy)
Ixigo takes pride in doing Zero Dollar Marketing. Almost all of their website traffic is organic, thanks to a strong and creative content marketing team with an award-winning content marketer (Ashish Chopra) heading it.
Ashish and his team follow their self developed IUCTC framework when they create content
I stands for Inspirational
U stands for Useful
C stands for Celebrating their life
T stands for Topical (Capture the moment)
C stands for Change the world
This framework is the precise reason for the virality of their content. 410 Million views and still Growing!!
However, the root of their content still lies in empathy towards their target market and people associated with them. Let’s quickly discuss how Ixigo implements it.
This is the video that Ixigo made on Women’s day where they talked about how every woman needs to take approval and answer a barrage of questions before she can travel.
This video had about 1.6 Million views in a single day and it made celebrities, media houses, and influencers talking about this.
This video demonstrated the concepts of Change the world along with being a Topical content
Another video that did brilliant for them, especially in Hindi, was the one they made on Mother’s Day. This video celebrated each mother’s life on how they prepare when their children or spouses go for travel.
This video across all media garnered about 3.3M Views.
This again was a demonstration of Celebrating their life merged with Topical content
That’s how Ixigo has been built, that’s how it has thrived for 15+ years. That’s how it navigated when their Series A term-sheet was dumped during the 2008 Lehmann brother crisis, that’s how they got better of the COVID19 crisis.
Hope you enjoyed reading it, I had a great time writing it. In case of any feedback, reach out to me on ashutoshgarg273(at)gmail(dot)com
