>> Live from Las Vegas
it's theCUBE
covering Adobe Summit 2019.
Brought to you by Accenture Interactive.
>> Welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with theCUBE.
We're in Vegas at the Adobe Summit 2019.
I think there's about 17,000 people.
The first time we've been here
but we've been excited to be here.
There's a crazy good buzz and energy
and actually a ton of CUBE alumni here at Adobe.
We're greeting old friends
but it's always great to meet new friends.
And coming off of great mention
in the keynote this morning
we're excited to have Santiago Aldana.
He is the CDO and CTO of Avianca.
Welcome.
>> Thank you, John.
>> So I was surprised this morning,
we were watching the keynote and there's Satya Nadella
and he has a shout-out for you guys.
>> It was quite a surprise.
It was very engaging and I'm happy to hear that.
>> Yeah, congratulations. >> Thank you.
>> And a little fact, you guys are
the second oldest commercial airline, he said.
I had no idea.
>> That's right, we've been flying for almost 100 years.
It's our 100th anniversary this year.
>> Awesome. >> So great, great.
>> Well, congratulations. >> Thank you.
>> So air travel's a really interesting industry
because it's growing like crazy
in terms of the total number of passenger miles, right?
More people are flying all the time.
But it's got to be super competitive.
You got to worry about fuel costs.
A seat mile is a seat mile.
So there's all kinds of interesting ways to compete.
You guys are really into it,
you've been successful for 100 years,
so how do you differentiate what you guys are doing
and continue to evolve and be successful?
>> So there's several things.
If you look 10 years back we used to be a domestic airline.
We used to have around 30 planes,
now we're around 170 planes.
We're the second largest airline in Latin America.
That has been a huge growth.
>> Wait, how long did you do that?
>> That's for the last 10 years.
>> 10 years you went from 30 planes to
170. >> To 170, 180.
>> And domestic to international.
>> To a Latin American airline.
>> That's a big move.
>> That's a big move but we're shifting our emphasis,
going more, rather than growth, going to profitability.
And to make that profitability we have to make
the strong transformation to make that happen.
>> So for profitability there's all kinds of things
that go in there, there's higher utilization,
there's hopefully everybody buys Teslas
so the gas doesn't cost as much for the airplanes.
How are you focusing on profitability?
'Cause here we're at Adobe, all the talk's
about experience, experience, experience.
If I'm flying on your plane, I want to get a good deal
and keep everything good but I'm not necessarily
that worried about your profitability.
>> So let me tell you a little bit about that.
If you think about an airline we're just
the distance between our customers and their dreams.
We're just the distance.
So the customer doesn't want to go to security.
The customer doesn't want to go to the whole hassle
of planning the trip.
Our purpose is reducing that distance,
reducing that effort, and when we reduce that effort
we're going to self-service,
we're going to personalize,
to make life easier for our customers.
That's the basic challenge.
And that has to do with three main areas.
One, knowing our customer.
The other one is, making sure that the value proposal
for that customer journey is proper.
So that's operational work.
And the other one is providing our employees
with enough information to make that happen.
All of those are working along data,
and data to be able to provide a real
value proposal to making that happen.
The customer has to be in the center of our strategy
and that's where we have to be working all the time.
And when you do this, it's not about technology,
it's about the customer.
And being that, about the customer,
the strongest challenge is not technology but people,
making people change so we that can provide
the value proposals to our customers.
>> So what are some of the things that you did to enable
the experience of my engagement,
whether it's electronic or whether it's when I'm talking
to that person at the counter,
checking in or getting on my flight,
how have you helped them provide me a better experience?
>> You talk as if it was part of the past.
To be honest, it's a journey,
we're still working on that.
There are several things that we did last year,
a whole bunch of things.
We changed our app, we changed our website,
we changed our interaction
with our customers with data.
And regarding Adobe, we're here at Adobe,
we implemented a whole set of tools.
So AEM, the website is a new thing.
Regarding Microsoft we implemented a CRM
to know about our customers.
We changed our app, and the app is like a platform
with which we're transforming the customer journey.
What we have to do at the end of the game
is changing those touch points so that those require
less effort from our customer, they're more seamless
and we are able to personalize and know in advance
what the customer is looking for to provide alternatives.
And that makes it more seamless.
So we're in that process of doing data-centered
decision making to reduce that effort
from our customers and make things happen.
>> So as you've gone through this journey to date
what are some of the surprising things that came up
that you just didn't expect at all, on a positive side?
And then what were some of the negative things
that you didn't know, that were so negative
that now you've kind of removed?
>> Okay, so I've been here in this business and Avianca
just for the last two years, so if you talk about surprises
this is my first time in airlines.
I wasn't expecting this to be so challenging.
>> Well, it's good to come at it
from a fresh point of view, absolutely.
>> I've been in banking, I've been in telcos.
Believe me, there's a huge technical depth,
there's a lot of complexity,
and bringing this customer information up to the table,
it's been challenging.
Lots of things going together.
Surprises, yeah, we have to work with our employees.
We have to transform that culture.
We have to move towards a more testing ...
Having experiments iterating
and learning from that process.
And that takes time and that requires
a lot change of culture.
The other one is being more agile
and that's more easily said than done.
So making the teams be more collaborative.
And working with partners.
We decided to choose a handful of partners
to make this transformation work.
And those partners, that's not one thing
that you just plug and play,
you have to make it work
and that requires a lot of effort.
Even if it's big, strong, world-wide,
world-level sponsors and partners, it requires
engaging and making them work together.
At the end it's about people in every part.
And making people work together, that's a challenge.
That's a challenge.
>> You've got the whole gamut too, 'cause you've got
the front line people that are directly engaged
with the client, whether again it be at the gate agent
or on the telephone or processing those things
all the way back to the senior management
and the operations which I'm sure are not only regulated
and very very finely detailed
for safety and everything else.
So that's got to be hard to try to drive transformation
in what was probably a pretty rigid situation.
>> It is, that's why you have to choose what to do.
And probably you don't know how to do it at the beginning
but you know what you want to achieve.
And that requires a more iteration way of learning,
experimenting and finding a way.
That's regarding agility.
And that's where you work with partners
to also leapfrog and move faster forward unto this.
That's where we choose partners as Accenture,
Adobe, Microsoft, SAP, and Amadeus.
And they're moving us forward unto that.
>> So what are some of the ways that you're trying
to measure success?
What are some of the things you're tracking
as you go through this transformation?
>> Well, several of them.
Let me talk just about a couple of them.
One of the things that we have to do
is make the buying process easier.
We're starting way behind, strong technical depth,
and we have to decouple our systems
to make those steps that our customer has to do,
make them fewer, easier,
and changing the whole booking flow.
But to do that, we don't have the answer.
First we have to decouple the system, the legacy systems,
and then we have to learn from our customers.
We have to do a lot of A/B testing
to see what works better.
Test and see if the process is
better accepted by our customers,
learn from that, probably fail, do it again,
iterate it and do it again.
And that process we have to engage unto that.
The other one is ...
So that's one of the areas.
But the other one is, how can we make sure
that the operational value proposal takes place?
Since we have been growing for the last 10 years so much,
we started from a local airline
to the second biggest airline in Latin America,
but that growth
is a little bit disorganized
and we have to set things up to make it happen.
We have to provide a lot more data and connectivity
to all our employees at the airports,
at the counters, at the call center,
and providing them with more customer information
to make it happen.
>> Right, so you're on that process,
so you're starting to deliver new data to the gate agents
and the people on the front line?
>> Sure.
>> So how are they reacting to that?
Do they like to be empowered,
are they afraid of being empowered,
are they saying, "Ah, finally I have the information
"in front of me that I can take care of this traveler?"
>> So there's not one answer for that.
In some cases we empower them and they enjoy a lot
and they say, "Hey, finally we got this."
For example, we are giving our ...
This is a recent project
that we launched at the airport.
We're providing them data through mobility,
making the turnaround of our planes faster,
and we're giving them much more data.
Before then, they had to call everywhere
to find what was happening.
Now they have it at their hands, and that's different.
So that changes the whole thing
and they look forward to that.
At other times, we sometimes do mistakes also.
We provided more information through the apps
to our pilots.
They were finding that awesome.
But then some of the information
that they used to have, we didn't get it.
So we have to iterate it and give it
and then they start loving it.
Regarding our customers, which is the other side,
it's not internal employees, we do some things
in which we test and sometimes they say,
"Oh, that was not what we were expecting."
So we have to learn from that.
I mean, it's not about making a huge waterfall project.
It's about learning in the process, failing, and iterating
and making it happen again and again.
It's a whole journey.
>> We just had our last guest, he talked about
trying to move this stuff to the cloud.
It's like, first time didn't work,
second time didn't work,
third time, hey, now it's working.
So you don't know until you know, right?
And what we hear over and over is
as you start this top-level transformation project
you uncover a bunch of stuff under the covers
that has to be reworked to support
what you're trying to do on the front end.
>> That's right.
>> I assume it's a lot of the same thing that you found?
>> You're exactly right, there's a lot of things in that way.
On all three areas.
Customer, on customer we didn't have customer information,
we didn't even have a CRM.
So we implemented our CRM at a huge fast pace
that we did it, in a year we already had it.
The app and the website, we have to totally remake it,
and getting more information from that
and getting personalized information regarding that.
That's technical depth,
I was not expecting that to be there.
>> So I'm just curious, what was the catalyst
of this transformation and this growth?
Were you trying to put in systems to support
the growth that you did from going from
a relatively small domestic airline to an international,
or are you trying to set the table for continued growth,
to continue on that growth path?
That's a pretty aggressive growth path.
>> It's a little bit more simple than that
and I'm going to be blunt here.
Three years ago the board at Avianca
was doing a search for a new CEO.
That's my boss right now.
He came over three years ago.
He used to be the president for Microsoft in Latin America.
In the interviews they told him a lot of things.
And after he was questioned and doing the interview,
he said, "Okay, let me say this now.
"Are you asking me to make Avianca
"a digital company flying airplanes?"
And they said, "Yeah, that's exactly right.
"That's what we want."
So that was the initial pace.
That was three years ago.
I joined the team two years ago.
There was already a vision, and that vision
is making things easier and effortless for the customer.
That's part of what we're trying to build.
And that is before, during, and after the trip.
If we are able to do that we're reducing costs,
we're making it simpler.
The whole process is about being simpler,
taking away complexity, making sure that our operations
are better, and that's taking away complexity.
You can do that through technology also.
But again, the biggest challenge is probably not technology.
It's a cultural change and it's the leadership required
to move on and make our employees,
our customers, take advantage of it.
>> Bold move by the board and a bold move by the CEO
but we hear it all the time.
Everybody's a digital company now, it's just
what product or service do you happen to wrap it around?
So what a great story.
>> Thank you.
And yeah, again, we got to go more data-centered,
we have to know our customer better.
If we want to do something personalized
the only way is through the data.
We have to know in advance what our customers
are requesting and trying to make it easier
for all of them, and that's the data.
>> Well Santiago, thanks for sharing your story.
And again congratulations on the keynote shout-out.
>> Thank you, thanks a lot.
>> All right. He's Santiago, I'm Jeff,
you're watching theCUBE.
We're at Adobe Summit 2019 in Las Vegas.
Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.
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