I’m Michael Krigsman, an industry analyst with CxOTalk.
And, we are here in New York City at the IPsoft Digital Workforce Summit.
I’m speaking with Mike Giresi, who is the Chief Information Officer at Royal Caribbean.
Hey, Mike!
Hey, Michael!
Nice to see you.
Likewise!
So, tell us about Royal Caribbean.
We operate in almost 47 different countries.
We have 50-plus ships, and we are currently in the process of undergoing a significant
transformation.
You’re running data centers that are floating around the world!
We have 50-plus floating data centers that operate ships that can support anywhere from
2,500 – 7,000 guests at a time.
You’ve been undertaking this major program of digital transformation.
So we are in the process of creating a frictionless and immersive vacation experience for our
guests.
So, what does that mean: “frictionless and immersive?”
Our intent is to make it as simple as possible for you to understand the product, to be able
to select what the product represents to you, and ultimately experience the product once
you’re on the actual, physical ship.
How do you use technology?
Well, technology more or less provides the entire guest experience.
What we're doing with our technology is modernizing it in a way that enables the guest to have
much more control and direct selection of what they want to do with the product itself;
moving from reservation being the center of our universe, to the guest being the center
of our universe, and then building capability services integration points.
[We are] enabling technology to move with the guests versus the guests having to traverse
different monolithic and antiquated systems, and ultimately feel like nothing is purposely
put together.
So when you say, “enables the guest to have more control?”
The more we can do with the product, in terms of enabling both guest and customer experiences,
if you will, but doing so in a way that broadens the ship.
Like, how do we expand the vacation experience beyond the ship, so that you’re not constrained
by the physical limitations of the ship?
That’s the design around the technology strategy.
Can you give an example of that?
So, using augmented reality, or virtual reality, to bring experiences onto the ship that you
would not be able to see; where you would not be able to experience because the ship
has physical limitations, so people can understand what’s happening with the ship, doing interesting
things with social.
Enabling people to self-select opportunities to go on excursions that may not have been
available to them in personalizing that information, so they can get to the things that are of
most interest to them.
We believe we are in the business of making tremendous memories.
The better we can provide that information to you, the more successful we’re going
to be in providing the product.
Where are you in the process of rolling this kind of technology out?
So, we're fairly early days.
We've gone through a lot of the heavy lifting from a foundational capability perspective.
And when you think about a ship, you have a bunch of people, obviously guests on the
ship, but there's a lot of crew on the ship, and there are a lot of supply chain processes.
I mean, what it takes to run one of these floating cities is no different than what
it takes to run a city.
You're just running it at sea.
So each time that ship comes into a port, each time it does something, there's an opportunity
to change and/or impact the experience.
So, how do we make sure we maximize our processes and people in support of this program so that
people feel like it's something of value?
So, your broader business strategy, then, relies on all of this technology and the goal
of the technology is to, as you say, broaden that guest experience.
We want people to feel like coming to a cruise is not an overwhelming or intimidating experience.
We want people to feel confident that as soon as they get on the ship, their vacation begins.
In fact, we’d love their vacation to begin before they arrive.
But once you enter into the port to walk onto the ship, we want it to be as seamless as
humanly possible.
We want you to enjoy it, feel relaxed, be excited; you have your itinerary, you have
your agenda, if you will; you know all the things you’re going to do.
If you learn of new things, how easy is it to change that, and be able to swiftly and
agilely adapt to whatever is available to you so you maximize that experience.
So, Mike, I know you’re working with Amelia and AI.
Yes.
What are you doing?
So, we are looking at two aspects of AI.
One is our actual workforce, and how we can provide better information, and help them
ensure that they are making every guest interaction; whether it's in our call center, whether it's
in our crew interacting with our guests; that those interactions are of high quality and
that we're driving a great experience.
We believe there's an opportunity to provide guests with more personalized information,
with more options that are relevant to their interests, and the more authentic it feels
to someone, people will be more friendly to it and they'll feel less intimidated by the
overall process.
Where is the AI component?
How does that fit?
AI enables us to quickly move those issues to a point of solution much faster.
As we've been able to train the system, we can proactively resolve issues before they
become issues.
When we turn a ship, it's much like a plane.
It's just a lot more complicate.
So our ability to disembark people off that ship, invite the new guests onto the ship,
and do that in a successful and high-quality manner, is critical to the success of the
journey.
So, IPsoft is helping us see the status of our systems, how healthy our systems are,
what the likelihood of having a problem is during that process, and to disable these
issues from happening.
Where we're looking at AI, in terms of taking it, is around the consumer experience.
When you come to a cruise site, the amount of data that's available to you is voluminous,
I mean, there's so much information.
If we know a little bit about you, and we kind of understand what you're interested
in, we can deliver that information in a much more personalized manner; call center, crew
... How do we get better information to people so they can service the guests and help the
guests maximize their interaction with the business?
Obviously, we think we can help convert and acquire people more effectively by understanding
behavioral trends and historical activities.
And for our crew, it's really about them having the right information when they most need
it to provide the right level of service to our guests.
Great!
Mike Giresi from Royal Caribbean.
Thank you so much!
Thank you, Michael!
I enjoyed it.