Conversational commerce is the next frontier to be conquered: Rajesh Magow

The industry has moved from its early desktop days to the digital era, with the accent now on mobile, Magow says

Rajesh Magow says he is a quick learner. During his first job at Voltas he quickly figured that the best way to grow is to give yourself a bird’s eye view of the business than just limit yourself to the task assigned to you. The five years he spent at Aptech after quitting Voltas, Magow worked hard to transition himself from being “the finance guy” to being a well-rounded “business person”. His knack for absorbing “everything that is happening around” him stood him in good stead during his short stint at education start-up Quantum, which wound up for various reasons, but gave him all the ammunition he needed to push MakeMyTrip into full throttle.

“But of course it’s Deep’s (Deep Kalra, founder & chief executive officer) vision and drive for continuous innovation that keeps MakeMyTrip ahead of the rest even after so many years and even after all the competition from all around,” says Magow as we take a quick look around Spectra, the vast all-day dining restaurant at The Leela Ambience Gurugram, to identify a quiet corner where we can continue the conversation. We settle down at a table overlooking the busy main road on the other side of the glass wall but also near the buffet section, where the spread straightway overshadows the hustle and bustle inside. It is not the best decision though, as we figure out within minutes of sitting down with our soup bowls.

Magow is a walking encyclopedia of the travel industry. He has seen the online travel industry go through several waves of technology transition. The industry has moved from its early desktop days to the digital era, with the accent now on mobile, he says. Every transition brought in its wake new challenges, he adds as he looks half-smiling, half-disapprovingly at a bunch of kids running up and down the aisle. “Very often you have to anticipate situations and change your offering to suit that situation. Unless you do that all the time, you will not be in the game for the long run. Especially in the internet business, which keeps you on your toes all the time,” says Magow as he digs into the starters and his soup. There is an impressive sushi spread but he sends back the serveur with a determined wave of his hand. “I am allergic to seafood you see,” he proffers an explanation.

Magow is meeting us just months after he rejoined the board of Flipkart, two years after giving up his board seat in that company. Is that in anticipation of the much-discussed public offering of India’s largest online retailer, we ask, picking from the sushi platter. “After all, you helped take MakeMyTrip public in 2010, making it the first Indian internet firm to list its shares in the US.”

Magow is non-committal. “People have been writing about it for sometime, but there’s nothing there for me to add. My task — my brief as you say — is just the same as the last time around...” he trails off without getting into the specifics. We can see he would rather talk about MakeMyTrip and the “interesting future that lies ahead”.

He changes the course of the conversation and starts talking about how data is changing the complexion of competition in the industry. “Innovation is not just about a new feature here or a tweak there. You have to solve specific consumer problems.” The company is using the mammoth amount of data it is sitting on to introduce what it calls personalised search. Based on search history including flights, hotels and travel destinations, MakeMyTrip-Ibibo customises its messages — on mobile or on the website — that are not visible to other users. But that’s hygiene, everyone is doing that, I say. In a slightly conspiratorial tone Magow says, as a next step, the company is also looking at conversational commerce, that is, using voice as input to help consumers carry out transactions online. That is similar to what a Siri or Alexa is doing. As MakeMyTrip penetrates deeper into regional markets, developing a language processing platform that will enable users to give voice input and get output in their native language — be it Tamil, Telugu or Hindi — is the next frontier to conquer. That’s impressive I say as I realise that bunch of noisy kids are our next table neighbour, along with their... well,p let me say it... indulgent parents.

We get up to check out what we may have as the main course. I head for the grill section as Magow looks up the Asian dishes. My colleague wants Indian food. We stack up our plates and head back. The noisy kids have reached the dessert section and are carefully opening the lids of each item and discussing what it might taste like.

Magow says even as MakeMyTrip continues to build up its technology backbone and sharpens focus on the hotel space, the group’s core focus remains travel. “If you are thinking about travel, you should be thinking about MakeMyTrip. That’s the vision,” he says. 

That was easier said before Yatra, Ixigo, Trivago..., I intervene. Magow counters: they are not exactly in the same space and have very different business models. Point taken, but it would still be difficult as consumers evolve and their expectations from the platforms they are on increase. He is not bothered by challenges, he says. His joining MakeMyTrip itself was not short of a challenge.

The story is like this. After it was clear Quantum wasn’t going anywhere, he started actively looking out. It was around that time that he got a call from a headhunter who urged him to meet MakeMyTrip founder Deep Kalra, who was looking to put together a founding team for his online venture. After a long first meeting, Magow decided to join Kalra as he liked “the transparency with which Kalra put the facts on the table about the health of his venture”. According to Magow, “Deep did not try and sell a job to me. Instead, he shared details about his business plan  objectively, providing me with information regarding the impending second round of funding from investors and so on,” He decided to go for it. The twist in the tale came a few days later when Kalra called up Magow to discuss “a few developments”. To cut a long story short, the incumbent chief financial officer in Kalra’s team, who Magow was to replace, had decided to stay back. That was because his future employer had withdrawn the offer. Second, the planned second round of investment too stood withdrawn. 

Magow recalls telling Kalra, “We will swim or sink together.”

The rest, as they say, is history. “Since then we have been together in it through its lows and highs,” says Magow. The so-called lows were the early days of the venture, when things moved slowly as money was short. “Once things started moving, there was no looking back. The big highs were MakeMyTrip’s IPO in 2010 and later on the acquisition of rival, ibibo Group in 2017.” 

MakeMyTrip has been clocking a 30 per cent year-on-year growth. Currently, hotels contribute 57 per cent to the company’s business. At the time of filing the IPO in 2010, airlines accounted for 90 per cent of the company’s revenue. “Today air bookings form only 30 per cent of our business with the rest being hotels and bus bookings. We will keep moving towards hotels because hotels are a much healthier business. It is fragmented and we can bring a lot of value to the hotel ecosystem,” says Magow.

When work is not on his mind, Magow likes to unwind playing cricket with his colleagues. Guess what, MakeMyTrip has its own cricket team. Are his two boys into sports? “The older one has just taken up his first job in Bengaluru and the younger one is studying and pursuing tennis at a school in Spain,” he says and refuses to venture towards the dessert section, plunging instead into a story about a colleague,  who first checks out the dessert menu when eating out with colleagues.