PegaWorld iNspire 2024: An interview with Booking.com

Explore how Booking.com successfully implemented and deployed Pega's customer service solutions across 10,000 agents in its customer support operations while maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.

A journey that is building the foundations for the Connected Trip through Connected Systems. Learn about the strategies, challenges, and best practices that enabled Booking.com to build for the future and drive continuous improvement.

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Transcript:

- Welcome, everybody. Hello. You have absolutely chosen the right session to be here. This is the one. Regardless of the shameless plugging from our keynote speakers, this is the ones to have come to. So thank you for making the journey over. Yes, indeed. Very good. Very good. My name's Simon Thorpe. I'm the Director of Product Marketing for our customer service and sales automation business. Have you been enjoying your PegaWorld experience so far? Yes. How are your feet? Yes, exactly, exactly. Well, it's actually, it's my first experience of PegaWorld. I've not been here before, I've not been to Vegas before, but hopefully like me, you've been inspired by the phenomenal presentations, the success stories, the innovations that are going down in the exhibition hall. It really has been a spectacle for us all. And how good was the violinist this morning? She was killer. And talking of inspirational, I'm thrilled to be joined by these gentlemen on stage because for my money, they're doing some of the most interesting things in customer service at the moment. I'm a long-term customer service guy, so I get all sorts of excitement from hearing people like this speak and bringing this to life. You may or may not know, but Booking.com, use our Pega customer service capabilities across their client and customer support centers and the team here, and I'm joined by Maarten, and Sandeep, and Pratik. They're gonna do a proper introduction in a minute, but they're gonna bring to life how they're using the application, the journey of transformation they've been on, and how they're delivering against the promise of bringing to life this connected trip experience. So we'd love you to hold your questions until the end, if we may, and we've asked you all to be fairly up the front, because the guys would love to take a picture with you all at the end if we can. So we're gonna have a bit of fun. We're gonna do this in a slightly unusual way because we've asked Maarten to interview his colleagues. So, lots of questions are gonna be on stage, but we'll give you plenty of time to grill the guys. So without further ado, I shall hand to Maarten. Tell us a little bit more about the team. Let's give him a round of applause.

- Awesome, thank you so much, Simon, for the introduction and very nice to see you all here. Yeah, I just heard, I wasn't there myself, but there was a violin at the keynote, so I can already say that's not gonna be here. You know, let's not try that, that will not work out well. But what we actually will do is talk a little bit about Booking.com and how we use Pega in our customer service department. So, just very quickly about myself, I'm Maarten. I've been with Booking almost a year now, and that's actually one of the reasons why I thought it would be a really setup to interview two of my beloved colleagues, Pratik and Sandeep to understand a little bit more on, you know, where do we come from between Booking and Pega, where are we now and where do we want to go to, right? So that's kind of gonna be the goal of this interview. My function is Vendor Manager for customer service. Let me set a look after all the vendors that we utilize within our CS department. Obviously Pega being a big one of those, and that's also, you know, one of the reasons why we're all sitting here today. We'll go in a lot of detail in a little bit, but before that, let me take a little bit of time to ask Pratik to introduce himself and tell a little bit about yeah, your journey at Booking.com so far.

- Thanks Maarten. Hi everyone, and welcome to the session. I'm Pratik Barasia and I've been at Booking for almost six and a half years, and in the customer service tech for almost four years now. Currently, I lead a couple of teams which basically build end-to-end journeys on Pega and my team is responsible for building both on the Pega side and building APIs, which are used to integrate Booking.com internal systems with Pega. Thanks.

- Thanks, Pratik. Yeah, and of course. Go ahead. Oh, it's a really good experience, right? So looking forward to have a nice chat. Sandeep, give us a short introduction about yourself as well.

- Absolutely. Good morning. I really hope you're having great time at PegaWorld Inspiring Sessions, lovely weather, et cetera, right? So myself, Sandeep Katukuri, I work as governance manager in Booking.com. I lead the internal center of excellence for Pega. We dearly call it Platform Governance Center. I've been in the space of Pega since a long time. Feels like forever in product partner and customer facing roles so far. Thank you and lovely to be here, and thanks for joining.

- Cool. Well, thanks Sandeep.

- All right, I'll actually, oh. And this was not planned by the way. I'll actually stand up for a second because I know most of you have been, you know, listening to a lot of stories, which I think are very interesting, right? And before we start actually doing the interview, I just wanted to check with the group about the kind of knowledge of Booking.com. I wanted to make it very simple, right? But a little bit interactive to kinda get a good judgment from our side, what you know about booking. And then we can also adjust our interview to that a little bit. I'll do it in a very simple way. So just by raise of hands, right? So it's not gonna be awkward in any shape or form. Just three questions and hopefully that will come back during the interview later as well, and you'll understand why it's actually relevant to our story. Of course, my booking's vision is to make it easier for everyone to experience the world. Again, we'll get back to that in a second. But firstly, I would like to understand from you guys, and please raise your hand, who has ever booked anything on Booking.com. So who has ever used the app or website?

- Wow. Okay, cool. That's really, really quick. Really quick estimate about 90%, 85, 90%. So that's really good. Happy to see that, right? Because Booking operates at a huge, huge scale. And I think that already shows by, you know, the amount of people that raise their hand here. We actually have some people spotting here. So if you didn't raise your hand, we'll come back to you after this, after this breakout and make sure that you... Yeah, so my ultimate goal here is to get it to 100% that's not artists. Cool, so that's first question. Second one, again, raise of hands. Who has ever booked anything on Booking.com that's not an accommodation? So we're not talking hotels and homes, but, you know, flights, attraction, car rental. Okay, still quite a lot of people. I would say 50, 60%. Very nice, very nice. Happy with that. So yeah, indeed, that's, you know, Booking is not only for accommodations, but we also really try to focus on what we call it trips, right? So that could be flights, that could be car rental, taxi, as well as attractions, right? And it's really important for us to, you know, if we want to make it easy for everyone to experience the world, that people can do that by not only booking the accommodation but also the flight, then take a taxi to the hotel or, you know, organize some attractions all via Booking.com, right? So that's ultimately the goal. And based on those two questions, you can already see the scale is really huge. And also the product offering is relatively complex, right? So that, you know, that poses some, you know, some complex things that, you know, we use Pega for. But we come back to that in a second. Just my last question, bit of a scary one, but who has ever had to contact the customer service department of Booking when they, okay, that's a little bit more than I was hoping for. That's okay though. Like, I think 20, 30%. Yeah, so we'll talk to you after as well, see if it was a good or not good experience. I really hope it was a good one, but of course, because of the scale that we operate at, the complexity of our products, we do have, you know, a lot of customer service complexity that we need to deal with. Really just to make it easier for everyone to experience the role, right? And that's what we're going to discuss during today's interview. I'll be interviewing Pratik, Sandeep about our journey with Pega so far. And hopefully we'll give some, give some visibility as to how we're trying to bring this alive with Pega for our customer service department. So with that said, a few data points that I think are interesting just to kinda give a little bit of, you know, we're not here with all worldwide, so we might be a little bit skewed, but here you see a little bit of the numbers that we deal with at Booking. So you see we have flights to basically all the world, right? With 4,500 destinations, on the right bottom you see that we offer over 43,000 attractions. So, you know, lots to choose from. Car hire is available in a lot of countries, taxis are available in a lot of countries. And that's really cool, right? That really brings together that full trip that we want to achieve. I think most interestingly, I'll see if I can point at it, is actually this number. So this is the data from early 24. So for, you know, the last, what is it, 13, 14 years, we've welcomed over 4.5 billion guests in homes and hotels, which is huge, right? That's more than half of the world basically that ever, you know, book via Booking if everyone would only book once, that is. So that's a huge number, right? And I think that that really shows the scale that we need to operate with. And even if we already have 1% of those guests stepping into accommodation, having to call customer service, that's a lot, right? 'Cause as you can see, we offer 24/7 support in 45 languages. You know, that sets a little bit the scene for the complexity that we deal with. So just wanted to share those numbers with you, the most relevant ones. And yeah, Pratik, Sandeep, are you ready for some questions?

- Absolutely.

- Cool.

- All right. So firstly, we obviously did a really good run through of what Booking is. Hopefully that helps. But I think it's also important to know a little bit more about the landscape of customer service. And I think, so Sandeep, you'd be the best one to talk a little bit about how is customer service set up at Booking and how does it relate to Pega?

- Sure. To start with, we use Pega at Booking for predominantly for the customer service solutions and also other non-customer service applications as well. So if we double click into customer service, as you mentioned, right? We cater more than happy population of the world. So it's nearly an impossible task, but we do it really well.

- Yeah.

- And if we further drill down, we have dearly two type of customers. A guest who actually books the accommodations, flights, cars, et cetera, right? So we call them guests-

- Yeah.

- Or bookers, and then the other part or another important customer is also the partners or the suppliers or the host who actually cater to this. host the guys and supply flights and taxis, et cetera, right? So the customer service solutions for us is a unique standpoint because we, being the one of the biggest travel platforms in the world, we have to have this typical amalgamation of this, both the customers-

- Mm-hmm.

- To again achieve the motto offers, which is to make everyone's experience easy to travel world. And so that's like an example, right? So let's talk about yourself, ladies and gentlemen. Maarten recently got engaged by the way, so congratulations. Thank you very much. Thank you.

- So have you planned for your honeymoon after that?

- No, not playing yet. Do you have a place in mind?

- Yeah, we actually have to go to Japan and discover that a little bit, so-

- Oh, lovely place.

- Yeah.

- Lovely place, right?

- Yeah.

- Sort of, yeah, you'll also escape the winter in Netherlands, maybe.

- Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, that's always good. Yeah.

- Absolutely. So imagine this scenario, right? So Maarten is a Dutch and English speaker. He wants to travel to Japan, other part of the world, to beautiful place, you know, have a lovely time together with his fiancee now. And all of a sudden he lands into Japan and then the host or the accommodation host could not host this lovely couple because of unforeseen reason. So Maarten, who just landed in Japan, for him Japan is still Japan, right? So if you think about it, it's a quite unusual situation and then you don't speak the language over there and then you would be like, it would be quite a surprise to handle for you. So Booking.com takes this responsibility, the customer service department, the lovely guys, amazing technology takes care of this responsibility to solve it for you. This is one part of it. And if you think about the next part of it, we have this kind of incidents or problems or issues which would want to solve for the customers throughout the world-

- Mm-hmm.

- Throughout the world, a number of numerous permutations and combinations. And if you think about it, the support is 24/7 and around the world. And to cater that, we have a huge agent population of 10 to 15,000 agents, right? So to enable them to solve our customer problem easily is the biggest challenge for us and that is the challenge we want to solve with Pega customer service at this moment.

- Yeah, it sounds like a little bit a complex task, right?

- Absolutely.

- But, yeah, cool that you're working on making my honeymoon a success. That's very nice. No, that's cool, so basically what you're saying, and the way they understand it, right? Is that there's a huge complexity and that we really want to use Pega to, you know, support and make sure that we can deal with that complexity, right?

- That's right.

- Which I can imagine for booking, if you, you know, the scale that you're at, I can imagine that's huge undertaking, right? And that's not so easy to implement that. So maybe it's a question to you Pratik, how has the journey been with maybe even before the journey, why even Pega, right? What is the reason that we selected Pega at Booking.com just to deal with this complex? Yeah.

- Yep. So I don't know how many of you know this, but Booking.com is a 28 years old company, right? And we have been pioneering in customer service. That means that we already have a CRM tool that we built ourselves, but as we wanted to grow into multiple business units, the whole CRM tool might not be able to scale up to that, right? And the whole CRM tool was built on Pearl, which is a legacy system, and it was built on a Monolith. So we also wanted to modernize that. If you wanted to do that along with catering to all the business needs, it would've been a really challenging problem.

- Mm-hmm.

- And also trying to catch up with all the innovation that is happening in customer service like Pega is doing, right? That it would've been a really big challenge. So that's why we really believe that if we leverage the innovation that Pega is doing in customer service domain, it gives us actually time and space to focus on our mission to make it easier for everyone to travel the world.

- Cool. Thanks. So that's really, you know, because booking deals with so much complexity, right? We needed some kind of platform to bring that best in class customer service, right? So we could actually, you know, focus on making sure that everyone would have a great trip, great travel and Pega was tool to kind of orchestrate that for Booking.com. Nice, and that kind of leads to my next question. I think that sounds really cool. Theoretically, I'm sure in real life that, you know, that's been maybe a bit more complex. So I'd be quite curious, how has the journey been with Pega so far, right? And are there any key learnings during the implementation phase? Would be great if you could share something about that.

- Yeah, I can actually think of a couple of them, right?

- Mm-hmm. Talking about the first one, because we are in a journey of moving most of our customer service journeys from our old CRM tool, which was TED to Pega consider a scenario where we are at 50%, right? So 50% of our journeys are on TED, and 50% of the journeys we have already migrated to Pega. So consider that if a customer tries to call us multiple times for the same reservation, it's quite possible that the customer service agent will have to service them either on TED or Pega and whichever tool they use, they will have to look at all the service case history at any point, right? So this actually brings a very big challenge of duality which you're facing and that means that the approach that we took to solve this problem was basically trying to sync all the communication and all the history from one system to the other. Which means that all the tickets and notes that were created on our OCRM system, which is TED, we tried to show them on Pega and all the service cases and interactions that we had on Pega, we had to show them on TED as well.

- That's kind of the view there, I think, right? That the showcase it.

- Yeah.

- Yeah. Mm-hmm.

- Yeah. exactly. So by trying to create this bidirectional sync, we kind of figured out that it was quite complex to build and also very hard to maintain. And while we were migrating more and more journeys away from TED to Pega, the scale actually also grew up of that. So we learned from that and we thought that, okay, let's maybe scope it down a bit and we change the processes to make sure that we don't have to do the same continuously. And we leverage actually a capability of case narratives that we embedded into TED, which actually helped us to scope down the problem of vibration six and help us with the velocity as well. The second problem that we faced actually came with the customer service domain itself. When we talk about customer service, it's a very complex domain in itself, right? We have a lot of stakeholders. When we look at stakeholders such as, let's say, Process Excellence, we have agents, we have a lot of different businesses already in Booking.com, which also needs to grow while we are doing the transformation. And while we wanted to start with Pega, everyone had their own ambitions of what Pega should look like. They wanted to achieve the best in the business. That actually meant that we started transforming in multiple dimensions at once. We started transformation, not only the platform, but we also transformed the UX, we transformed the process and a lot of things together, which actually made the change or the scope of the change so much that it was really hard, both from program perspective on and from agent perspective to manage, right? So, and we face this problem quite a lot because if we talk about Booking.com scale, we do have a lot of journeys to actually migrate. So looking at that, when we actually started to think about migrating the partner facing agents also from TED to Pega, we thought of doing an experiment where we thought that let's just do a lift and shift, right? And that would mean not just lifting and shifting the processes to Pega, but lifting and shifting also the UX. I know some of you might be cringing right now hearing about this because we also had to take a lot of exceptions from Pega to get approvals for this. But it actually was worth it at the end. We were able to manage to do the whole transformation in six months. And we are actually testing with live agents right now. And it actually helped us to solve the first problem because with this, we were able to do the whole transformation in six months. We were able to put it live to the agents directly without the problem of having for them to work on two different-

- Mm-hmm.

- Systems at once. And as we're speaking, we are actually putting it live for our agents to handle the peak for Booking.com in the summer. Thanks, Pratik. So yeah, I can imagine looking at that, right? If you have two systems and as an agent you constantly have to alt tab or whatever function it is, that's really complex, right? And that's not really beneficial for the efficiency of the agents, right? So quite interesting to hear that rather than going for a complete redesign, which I think often is, you know, proposed, right? Actually worked better to go for the lift and shift for Booking.com as a company. I'm sure that maybe people are wondering as well, right? Would that apply to all companies or industries you think? Or was it something very specific to Booking that it just kind of made sense to the lift and shift, but really only in that industry. What is your thought on that?

- Yeah, I think that's a good question because it really depends on the industry itself and what complex systems that you have.

- Mm-hmm.

- For us, because the transformation was such huge, it brought a lot of complexity with it. And also in Booking.com, we talk a lot of about experimentation and there's a key thing in experimentation that while you're doing a transformation, just change one thing at once. If you try to do change multiple things, you cannot actually compare apples to apples at the end. So that's why I think lift and shift was really a good option for us for this and maybe it's a good thing for other people to explore if that actually fits their purpose.

- Yeah, that's a good one to give some thought right on what really works best for your industry and your current setup and good learning. The learning is a little bit more on the tech side. Was there anything on the organizational side that you learned or maybe on the people side, that maybe was complex to manage? Anything, you know, you could elaborate on there?

- Yeah, I'm glad that you asked that question, right? Because when we started on this journey with Pega, we were doing Pega for the first time at Booking. So we onboarded a vendor to help us with that. And the idea initially was that the vendor will help us to build the journeys on Pega and our internal teams will basically create APIs to help integrate with internal systems. And we tried a lot of different approaches around ways of working that will actually make sense and will help us to achieve the problem but it was not working. So eventually because what we had to do was not just work with these two set of people, but we had a lot of different crafts which were involved, like product, UX, testing, et cetera, and trying to work with all of them at once. And this setup was not working because there was a lot of handovers. All of these people actually were working in silos at some point, and the process was very SDLC in terms-

- Mm-hmm.

- Of that, okay, once design is done, then someone picks it up, then someone picks it up, right? So there were a lot of handovers and we were not able to solve the problem from end to end. So starting this year, we have actually tried a new experiment on our org setup where we are using cross-functional teams, which means that we have created teams with all these crafts at the same place, which is to be fair, a bit harder to manage because we have so many people in one team. But because we have end-to-end ownership of all these journeys in the single team with clear ownables and clear scope, we've actually proved that we are able to deliver much faster-

- Mm-hmm.

- And we've actually been able to deliver on time for a lot of things. So yeah-

- Yeah.

- I think that's a really good learning and a good experiment that we did

- That's a great learning and thanks for sharing that, right? So more on the tech side, it's the question, right? Do you go for lift and shift or redesign? It's a complex one and then the organizational side more. Do you go for cross-functional teams? When do you do that? I think those are, you know, really good learnings, maybe also nice to chat on about that later, right? I think-

- Yeah.

- Sandeep with your experience, would you agree with these two learnings? Anything else that you would have to add there that would be interesting?

- Maybe I could do differently, right? So I think about it, maybe hire both of us a couple of years ago.

- Yeah. Okay, that's-

- On a lighter note, right? But I totally agree with the very in depth insights, right? So if given a chance, I would also shift the timeline of CFTs-

- Mm-hmm.

- And also involve a center of excellence for the governance team very early in the process so that we build everything in the right way.

- Mm-hmm.

- Let's see. That's something I could do.

- Yeah. Okay, there's a nice addition, right? Just to make sure that you get that governance going on time right?

- Yeah.

- Rather than doing it too late in the end, the process. Cool. Nice, thanks for that insight, guys. So I think it's cool now, right at, at Booking.com we have implemented Pega at a quite a large scale for accommodations, right? It's been a journey with some learnings that's very nice. I think from my side, you know, always working for booking, right? Always looking to the future. I'm quite curious and maybe Sandeep you can talk to this, right? What does the future hold for for Booking, Pega? You know, what is your vision about that?

- Sure, Booking.com is a extremely innovative company. Most of the parts, not only customer service, we always have one leg into the future, right? So there are so many critical strategic innovations which are going on within the group. And it's all with a single motto of, again, making customer life easy-

- Mm-hmm.

- Or experience to travel the world, right? So I can share a bit about one of our key initiatives for less connected trip.

- Mm-hmm.

- We can start with the video. I can share something on the screen

- I think that happens to be there. So about 30 seconds. So let's see what the connector trip really means, right?

- Yeah.

- Cool. Yeah, that's a call for action as well, right? For the ones that didn't raise their hands initially. So that's where you can find that. And oh, sorry, go ahead, Sandeep.

- Absolutely, so what you saw just now is as a customer, you could always book accommodations, flights, experiences, attractions separately, but the vision which you want to have it tie all of them together and simplify the customer's experience as a connected trip-

- Mm-hmm.

- Vision. So what it means for customer service, right? So then we need to enable our regions to solve all the problems during a trip. Consider an example, you have booked a flight, a taxi, and an accommodation with us and then you just had an issue with your first leg of the journey.

- Mm-hmm.

- Let's say your flight got delayed, right? So in the previous world, you have to actually make a couple of contacts and then, you know, for flight separately, for rental cars separately, for your hotel separately and solve it all by yourself, right? So, but now in this version with the connector trip, just make one contact to Booking. Say that my connector trip has a vision issue and then Booking.com says, "Don't worry about it, we'll solve it." And maybe you can say, have a next contact and that thank you Booking, and then that's it.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so everything is taken care of you and then you can focus on more important things and have a good experience in exploring the world.

- Mm-hmm.

- And so this is kind of what we want to do is one of the vision which we see, and if you say to it world is ever changing in this space, right? So the customer trends are changing, the technology is changing. We all see so much buzz about AI and GenAI in this very conference-

- Mm-hmm.

- As well, right? So it's really important for us, especially part of the governance team to be ready for future, right? So we have one leg in the future and we have also one leg in the current state.

- Yeah.

- And so we at, in the world of Pega, we are talking about, let's say in a couple of years ago, we always built UI kit applications-

- Mm-hmm.

- Right? So now we are all looking forward to build constellation application. So it brings up quite some interesting questions or challenges like, you know, okay, how do I protect my existing investments? How do I still make progress towards the future?

- Mm-hmm.

- Should I redo the entire Constellation UI? Should I redo the entire data model? Should I extend my common data model from Pega? Right? So that could be one of the question. Like for example, we actually did a good POC to have a glimpse of what our architecture can look like and it had-

- Yeah.

- Further more a subject to it-

- Yeah.

- Together with-

- I think we have it- maybe this one, right?

- Yes, absolutely.

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- Yeah, so we did this with Pega systems together-

- Yeah.

- [Sandeep] And then this is one of a view, and traditionally we are all used to view the Pega architecture as a situational layer cape, right?

- Mm-hmm.

- So we kind of made an attempt to shift that paradigm. So we rotated it by 90 degrees, right? So you have to read this from left to right. So what we made is we split down into modular applications. We want to expand the customer service to other business units, which in within Booking.

- Mm-hmm.

- So really supporting the connected revision at the same time, making sure that we really have a center of architecture. So everything is in this architecture exposed to other BUs, right? And then they can expose this customer service capabilities in their own channels.

- Mm-hmm.

- And then we can also connect to the underlying APIs. If you really think about it, this is a booking version of center of architecture. It's just a glimpse.

- [Maarten] Yeah.

- [Sandeep] And I personally learned a lot of AI capabilities right now, right? So to call out the agent trainer, the Socrates, and so many knowledge for it-

- Mm-hmm.

- [Sandeep] And so many things over there. So maybe when I go back, we have to do something else.

- Yeah.

- I can show a different picture altogether-

- Yeah, yeah.

- Next time we meet.

- Yeah.

- And so it's a good partnership and then it's a good way to go there. You always have a north star architecture by the time you go there in the north star architecture is again, one mile-

- Mm-hmm.

- Far away from you.

- Yeah.

- So this is the world and as long as it's far, that means you are making the right steps towards the future.

- Yeah.

- And then it's very important to adapt things early, give feedback, for example, blueprint.

- Mm-hmm.

- So we just had a small experiment in blueprint within Booking.com. We immediately gave a couple of feedbacks to Pega Systems together with Heist and Matt Healey, right? So what we now saw yesterday is a couple of our feedbacks are already product based. Really glad to see that-

- Right so.

- Right?

- Yeah.

- So really nice.

- That's nice. Yeah.

- So this is what we are saying, so we have a vision, we have a problem, we want to put up a solution protecting our existing investments.

- Yeah.

- And also making efficient and fast progress towards future.

- Yeah.

- So that's exactly how we see future at customer service in Booking.com.

- Cool, yeah. Thanks for the insight, right? And what I'm getting from this, right? from as a less technical person is really that Pega will be set up from a foundation, right? And just make sure that everything is running well, that we are able to actually enable Pega and that connected trip vision, right? For all or business units, like flights, attractions, everything, right? That's the long term. But you need to have the foundation right, and only then you also start adding and sprinkling on top of GenAI capabilities and like all the cool stuff, right? But you need to, you cannot forget about the foundation.

- No.

- That's what I'm getting, right?

- Yeah.

- So that's a nice takeaway. And I also, right, I was at the innovation up and then you see everything's, it's really exciting, but it's good to hear as well that you take care of making sure that the foundation is set up properly. So thanks for that, Sandeep. I'm sure maybe there will be more questions on this later, right? I think it's quite a detailed framework. Maybe just for you, and kind of as a closing question, I know the foundation is important, right? However, yesterday I've heard that the future is I believe Gen Ai, Gen Ai, Gen Ai, Gen Ai, four times, right? Yeah, so can you give some insight on how Booking is using GenAI, planning to use GenAI? Anything that you can share?

- We have 5 GenAIs in Booking. We use it all.

- Everything. Yeah.

- No. So we are looking forward for really exciting opportunities-

- Mm-hmm.

- At Booking.com with AI and GenAI, all the cool stuff. I think we'll definitely look forward for it. I would really suggest, listen gentlemen, like, you know, to tune to this group, but for next year, that's when we could share more insights with our AI exploration.

- Okay, so that's a commitment of you to present all the AI agenda.

- No, no, no, no. You cannot hold me on that.

- Okay, plan it in your agenda everyone to be there, no, that's cool. I think that's an exciting future, right? So thank you so much guys for providing some perspective to that. Just to really quickly recap from my side, right? 'Cause it's also really nice for me to learn about our journey with Pega so far, right? Is that, you know, we came from a long way, right? We learned a lot of things on the way to implement Pega at full scale, at in accommodations, you know, where we really learned on how do you look at lift and shift versus completely redesigning. How do you look at your org structure? When you involve governance? I think all super interesting questions, right? Thankfully as Booking, I think we are good at learning and moving that forward, right? So hopefully it'll be an easy journey moving forward and also really exciting with the GenAI parts, right? So I think maybe, you know, just to come back to the icebreaker initially, you know, already based on this room, we see that the scale of Booking is huge, the complexity of the products is huge, and therefore the complexity of customer service that we need to offer is really big, right? And it is really interesting to hear the journey that we're taking with Pega on that and to make sure that we, you know, can keep going and making it easier for everyone to experience the world. So yeah, again, thank you so much. Thanks everyone here. I think with this I'll hand back to Simon who will take the next step. So over to you Simon.

- Wonderful idea. Wonderful.

- Yeah, it's easier for you guys as well, right? No prep needed-

- And we need to-

- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

- And to worry about what to do. That's very, very good.

- Thank you. So folks, we'd love to invite questions and you'll see . So we'd invite you to come up to the microphone, introduce yourselves and fire away. I've got a couple of questions in my head 'cause I was fascinated by the talk as well. But come on up and fire questions at the guys. See, no one ever wants to be first, are they? This is why I had something locked up in here. So guys, I mentioned at the start, when you, we've got to know each other a little bit over the last few weeks. I'm a call center guy through and through. I've managed contact centers throughout my career. What you've done at the scale in which you've done is pretty mind blowing from my experience. I mean, just remind us the amount of agents using Pega customer service.

- [Pratik] 10 to 15,000.

- 10 to 15,000. So we're not talking small numbers here, folks. And that was a rollout of six months thereabouts.

- Yeah, more than that. But overall, yes,

- It was fast. It was fast. Now I'm led to believe, and I hope I'm not sharing too much here, that during that time your customer satisfaction metrics remained as positive as they all's are. As you know, there was no dip there. You were able to maintain that level of a customer experience for your clients. That kind of scale rollout to that many people. And to be able to do that is quite astonishing. I've certainly never come across it in my career. What do you put that down to in terms of that collaboration with the agent population?

- Can perhaps I should show you some metrics. So first of all, it's all possible because of the immense collaboration for tech product SCD WFM, the lovely agents, all of us, right? So big kudos to all the teams involved with them. So it is considered a huge program, right? So how do you roll out, how do you train your agents? It starts from there, and then how do you prepare for your architecture and then how do you track various developments over there? So that really helped us and it's end of the day an agent desktop software, right? So in this case, so the training of the agents, the collaboration with them really, really helped. And we have something called this hub and scale and experimentation kind of nature in Booking. And that's, that's how much I could share. So that's a key for success, I would say.

- And what was the agent reaction? Because I've worked with all manner of agents and they traditionally quite skeptical people. Anything new is not always particularly positively received. What was that experience like?

- Yeah, we always have that, right? So we do always have that, but it is an initial blocker as I mentioned. The big part of the success is also on the agent training and the approach of the agent training, and the rollout mechanism of them. So the folks there really did a fantastic job. We constantly take feedback, we shadow with the agents and see the behavior and we get the feedback back to the product and then we also make their life easy so that they can make customers life easy. So that's the loop we always run in and that's been tremendously helpful.

- I think you've touched on something there that often it sounds like it's baked into everything that you do as a business, which is one of the reasons why you are so progressive and innovative. You've pulled the agent population into that program of transformation. They're a key stakeholder. It's not something you are doing to them or, you know, they're part of that rollout, they're part of that program of change. And I think that's a critical part of any success because they're invested. It's not something that's been done to them and I completely applaud you for doing that at such pace.

- Maybe one thing to add to that, Simon, just because that's what I've heard, right? And then always a Booking. I think the time that we were actually, well agent had to use our old CRM, right? Or in-house built and Pega at the same time, obviously they did not love the right? Who would like-

- Yeah, yeah.

- To switch between systems, right? So I think that was a, a complex time for agents to start and getting used to Pega. Only so many journeys were on there. So I think that's really complex at that moment, right? What I've heard, and I think this was from the learning and development team is the moment we actually started scaling more and more with Pega and they actually saw the full, you know, power that it has and they could actually use the full product. A lot of that actually came back like, okay, yeah, this is, you know, this is really nice, this makes it easier for us. And just, you know, living that the advantages that Pega can bring, I think that was really something that shifted some of the mindsets of the agents as well, right?

- That's right.

- So I think it's also about that, right? Just showcasing what a product can do.

- Giving them that sight of the future as well.

- I think so I think big-

- Very good.

- Combination that, yeah, yeah.

- Great. We've got a question. Yes sir.

- We do. So this is a question to whichever one of your legs is in the future, whichever one that is.

- I think that Sandeep guy always in the future with his likes.

- [Audience 1] So like with your ambitions to grow and get more customers, do you see the future of the customer service world having more or less agents? Do you see yourself getting more and more agents after to service those more and more customers? Or do you think you're gonna use technology in ways to service more customers with less agents?

- Everyone knows this one, right? So the best customer service is with zero contact. So we always aspire to go there. But our motto at this moment is always to make it easier for everyone in the world. So the connected remission, which I share, so that's our target. We want the customers to definitely make less and less contacts or have a tremendous improvement in the first call resolution, right? So that's where we are headed and not with the increase over the decrease of the agent population presently.

- Very good. Any final questions? I know everyone's hungry to get to the lunch. I know I am. All right, well, it just leaves me one more time to say a big thank you to Pratik, Sandeep and Maarten. You did a wonderful job. Thank you.

- That doesn't work well together, right?

- Yeah, that always happens.

- Yeah.

- You did a wonderful job. Really appreciate the partnership and we appreciate you taking the time to share your experiences and you know, the, to give us an insight into the positives and the learnings that you've been through during that transformation stage. So thank you, let's give them one more round of applause.

- Thank you, everyone.