Sruthi Poduval

This project aimed to increase the search-to-book conversion rate. I led multiple initiatives and pursued a four-dimension approach to accomplish this goal:
1. Improving the information on the results and details pages, making sure the decision making content is readily available and noticeable
2. Identifying and adding essential content and services for the customer, making them all available through our platform as a one-stop solution for all things required while making a flight booking
3. Improving platform usability to make the booking journey as easy as possible
4. Pursuing unique services appealing to the customers and made Almosfer.com attractive for flight bookings, such as fare calendar, installments, wallets, and pay through stores

This project aimed at increasing customer retention on Almosafer's platform. I led the post-COVID business strategy to increase retention by focusing on the customer experience. This involved conducting customer research and analysis to understand the customer pain points related to post-COVID travel and identifying and pursuing the initiatives to address them. The two main pain points were lack of access to correct information, addressed by creating a central information repository related to country and quarantine rules; and the need for flexible and easy-to-cancel options due to the COVID-19 and changing rules, addressed by providing more accessible options for booking and canceling flights. I drove the initiatives that addressed these pain points and improved customer retention on the platform.

The project involved devising and leading the strategy to increase the margin per flight booking by identifying products and services to sell along with the flights. I conducted market research to identify add-ons and services that customers are interested in purchasing while making a flight booking. We found that customers are always interested in buying additional services like travel insurance, priority check-in, and lounge access while booking a flight. I analyzed the vendors and available solutions for these services. I also implemented those that better meet the customer interests and are high-margin partners for the business, thereby increasing the overall revenue margin per flight booking from 6 to 7%.

Almosafer.com is an online travel agency focused on customer experience and customer needs. All of the airline content was consumed from multiple suppliers and aggregators initially. I created a business case to show the business value of directly connecting to the airlines. This direct connectivity allowed us to get quality content straight from the airlines and have content and services that were non-available with the aggregators. This also helped reduce our search response time by eliminating the intermediate system and eliminating supplier costs previously paid to the suppliers.

Customer preferences depend on various parameters such as the destination of travel, travel purpose and type, number of travelers, and previous experience. I identified such parameters as essential data points and created a recommendation algorithm that gave suitable weightage to those parameters depending on the traveler's needs. This recommendation algorithm made it easy for customers to find the right flight as per their preferences.

From data analysis and customer research, it was clear that customers often needed support during travel. Travel websites frequently overlook this part of the user journey. I designed and implemented an initiative to provide real-time flight status tracking to inform customers through notifications and alerts of even the slightest change on their travel, such as gate change or flight delay.

Created a management system for vehicle health inspection for an automobile giant in Kuwait. This company was one of the largest in Kuwait and had most of its processes being fulfilled manually. Designed this solution for the agents who inspect the vehicles in the automobile warehouses. The application was designed for iPads and used 3D imagery that enabled agents to quickly take notes on different parts of the vehicle after inspection.

This retail megastore had offline retail stores for home furniture and wanted to attract more customers by creating an online platform to reach more customers. I designed and created an online website primarily focused on bringing new customers and building customer engagement with the products listed online. I also launched a marketing campaign to target customers interested in similar things.

I designed and implemented an easy-to-use iOS-based solution integrated with the warehouse stock monitoring system. The solution could also scan barcodes to quickly identify the items and update the warehouse ERP. This automated manual processes for the client and vastly increased organizational efficiency.

Data analysis and user behavior analysis pointed out that customers are often interested in booking different combinations of one-ways instead of booking a round-trip flight. Most online travel agencies do not offer the ability to book any flight combination primarily due to supplier limitations. I designed and developed the Flight + Flight product that allowed users to combine flights from different suppliers. This saved customers a lot of effort in comparing and combining different options and improving their experience on the platform

Led the discovery process to identify the tools and views required in the biologist platform to be used by target analysts, biologists, data scientists, and project portfolio management teams.

Tasked with building tools, solutions, and capabilities that drive automation using machine learning, network science, and statistical techniques to help find Biological targets faster. Worked with teams of biologists, data scientists, and other ML experts to design experiments, provide specifications, and specify ML model requirements to help develop new solutions.

1. Conducted a comprehensive site audit and meticulously restructured the sitemap to ensure precise configuration. A coherent and well-organized sitemap is pivotal in facilitating optimal crawling by Google, thereby granting seamless access to pertinent information housed within the site.
2. Refactor Href-lang tags - Refactored Href-lang tags to ensure customers would be sent to the right site with the right language settings. This is essential to improve the site's visibility in search results.
3. Broken Links - Audited the site to find broken links and ensure customers are not led to dead pages. If Google crawler finds broken links on the site, google automatically pushes the site below in search results.
4. Blogs - Implemented new blog posts on the website, strategically enhancing its content. Recognizing the significant potential for blogs in the fashion eCommerce sector, we established a robust infrastructure in collaboration with the content, marketing, and creatives teams. This collaborative effort culminated in the creation of weekly blogs, contributing substantially to the augmentation of the site's search result visibility.

I used a tool called Segment to aggregate conversion events on the platform and distribute them across ad platforms. This is essential in order to understand revenue on each platform, which is crucial to deciding on spending and getting the best ROAS (Return on Ad Spend)

WORK DONE
• Created customer profiles. Customers have unique IDs on each platform. They also visit multiple social platforms in a day and see ads on different platforms. I created a unified customer profile by mapping IDs across platforms with Google Analytics, Segment, and a tool called "Adjust" for the app. I studied customer journey paths across platforms.
• Created attribution models with the help of data teams based on the customer profiles that were created. I built three attribution models: First-click attribution, Last-click attribution, and Mixed modeling(weighted attribution across ad platforms).

I conducted discovery and research in order to understand the best way possible to implement deep linking technology. Deep linking is crucial as offering customers a seamless experience between seeing ads on different social platforms and transacting on the website is very important. With the advancements in privacy and settings imposed by Apple, this proved to be a challenge. I resolved this issue by working with social platforms, specifically Meta, and found a viable solution.

WORK DONE
• Led the planning, execution, and optimization of digital advertising campaigns across multiple platforms, resulting in an 8% increase in return on ad spend (ROAS).
• Utilized A/B testing and data analytics to refine targeting strategies, improving click-through rates (CTR) by 15%.

I created customer cohorts to understand customers. Customers were split into 10 different cohorts: champions, loyalists, promising, potential, newbie, churning, sleeping_newbie, high_risk, dormant, and lost. For each segment of customers, specific campaigns were designed and run.