Ctrip's Partial Customer Service Has Been Taken Over by Artificial Intelligence Interview with Ctrip’s CTO: Mr. Gan Quan

Recently, Ctrip celebrated its 18th birthday at its headquarter in Shanghai. Founded in 1999, it is now the largest online travel company in China.

Whether it is the mouse + cement or thumb + cement, Ctrip both showed its ability to serve and arrange supply chain control while shaping the basic playground of the online travel industry.

If you use a few key words to sum up Ctrip's competitive advantage, those will be services, call centers, supply chains, and business travel customers etc. Under these terms, Ctrip is rarely associated with technology. But technology's importance to Ctrip may be beyond the imagination, and Ctrip's emphasis on technology is growing.

Most complex e-commerce form

One year ago, the co-founder James Liang announced to step down from the chief executive position, after which, Ctrip execute a large adjustment. After the adjustment, Ctrip welcomed the new CTO Mr. Gan Quan - previous Qunar platform CEO.

Gan joined Qunar in 2010. He has more than 10 years of relevant working experience. During the six years in Qunar, he served as director of wireless technology, senior technical director, wireless business group vice President, and is responsible for organizing and managing wireless R&D team, big data team, wireless technology system team, wireless engineer management system, wireless security and operation support system team, which given him rich experience in the online travel technology area.

In Ctrip's Shanghai headquarter volley SOHO office, after a full year as CTO, Gan says he understands outside’s fuzzy viewpoint on Ctrip’s technology ability, but also he is more willing to take time to explain the technical status and what role the technology plays in such a big giant corporation like Ctrip.

"In fact, when we were recruiting in the schools, many students were asking us questions like this: Ctrip is doing travel business, but I didn't think of working in travel business, I wanted to go for technology. But when you talk to him about what problem Ctrip is trying to solve, he will suddenly realize that the technical obstacles that Ctrip has to deal with are also very complicated.”

In the case of airline ticket business, the combination of different elements means a huge amount of data, with the number of routes added, the different policies of each airline, and the price strategy of the agents. Meanwhile, the inventory and price of tickets are changing in real time. Changes in the face of such a big and frequent data, technical system has to think how to enable users to experience a few seconds in front the ticket booking, calculate the price what you see is what you get, this is the main focus or problem for the technical team to solve.

The same is true to hotel business: the combination of various details such as room inventory, room price, room type, etc., which also means huge amount of data. To this end, Ctrip needs to build a very large distribution system to solve the problems of data storage, search and price consistency.

"The physical commerce is different because it is a stock system, the inventory price may not change, it may be a long time before it will be adjusted, so there will be fewer dimensions and the changes in the data will be small." Therefore, in the view of Gan, Ctrip is facing fundamental problems in the business of travel e-commerce, and even the most complicated of all e-commerce forms. Technology has more meaning with Ctrip.

Aerial refueling

After being promoted to CTO, Gan became busier. In addition to facilitating the integration of Ctrip and Qunar's technical system, he also needs to address the issues of efficiency, resource allocation and the capacity to output the technology system. Switching from Qunar to Ctrip, Gan reacquainted with the strategy of "Leader" Ctrip and the need to consider and balance.

As an established company created the online travel industry in China, the development of Ctrip has witnessed the development of China's Internet, mobile Internet from scratch, and the accumulation of the entire system. There are a lot of the old system needs to be updated, and need to upgrade technology system. At the same time, the functions of some teams are very important at the time, but with the development of business and technology and the changing times, skills need to be transferred to new areas and need time to adapt.

Historical burden exists objectively, but the development of the company puts forward new requirements to technology. Gan described this update iterative process as change a tire when the car is running, or refueling aircraft during a flight. Upgrading and improving the technical system without affecting the normal operation of the business requires a longer transformation cycle, which is expected to take two years.

It is significant to improve Ctrip through technology.

Experienced the bloody war of online travel industry, Gan knows very well the newcomers’ way to challenge industry giants: growing up during the period of the mobile Internet, and there is no historical burden, and the efficiency is very high. At this time, if simply compete efficiency, it must be wrong, so Ctrip must use its advantages.

"Ctrip, has the advantages on supply chain, price, and the customer base, if technology can solve the problem of efficiency, it will be very severe. If Ctrip use the same efficiency strategy to compete with other companies, its own advantage is not so strong, because Ctrip also constantly needs to solve such problems. If the opponent's weak points cannot be improved, then the competitive advantage will be reversed, and in a nutshell, the competition between the two companies must be comprehensive.”

In order to achieve the goal of continuous improvement of efficiency, Gan took office in addition to transforming Ctrip technology system and solving the problems of Ctrip and Qunar technology integration.

In the future, Ctrip will set up a research and development center in Beijing to make full use of the advantages of Qunar's technology system, and implement some technical projects in which Ctrip is going to cooperate with each other, Gan said.

Another important task of Gan is the continuous construction of Ctrip's engineer culture.

Since last year, Ctrip fully implemented committee system, made a line of research and development manager, and the engineers have the opportunity to speak out, and let the team in the field have their own professional organization. Currently, Ctrip’s internal vertical fields are big data, wireless, the server architecture, quality, safety, and other fields, all of which has its own professional committee to make technical decisions.

Now, in the process of using technology to improve its competitiveness, Ctrip is experimenting with the latest tool: artificial intelligence.

New weapon: AI

It may be hard for ordinary users to sense that some of the features on Ctrip have been taken over by artificial intelligence, and that the source of change began in 2015.

Dividends in 2015, as the mobile Internet traffic peak, widely spread in the smartphone, and people travel demand presents under the background of explosive growth, Ctrip accumulated data volume increase sharply. The rapid expansion of data provides the basic conditions for Ctrip to develop machine learning.

In 2016, Ctrip set up a smart customer service team, which then launched a personalized purchasing program. Intelligent customer service is not hard to understand, the personalized guide is based on the historical data of users, tailored to push for its content or products - before the artificial intelligence, most of these content output depends on the experienced editors for manual operation.

At present, in the after-sales environment of hotel sector, intelligent customer service has been able to solve 70% problems, and will gradually expand to the after-sales service of airline ticket, tourism and car.

The most difficult challenge lies in the more complex and varied problems facing pre-sale scenarios compared to the after-sales scene, which raises technical requirements for intelligent customer service.

For the development of artificial intelligence technology, Ctrip's overall goal is to raise revenue, improve efficiency and reduce costs. Specifically, Ctrip divides the scenes into pre- sales and after-sales. Before selling, the AI technology helps users to better understand their needs, meet their needs and help them make decisions; after sale, it will answer and solve problems quickly and accurately. On the vertical dimension, according to different problems of different businesses before and after sales, more scenarios are broken down and more targeted solutions will be offered based on big data development.

In the process of using AI technology to enhance the product experience, Ctrip has a very open mind.

At present, the intelligence of Ctrip project take the development pattern of PK service: the target scene platform for the data import, data to a third party company (such as Zhuiyi Tech, and Laiye etc. ) algorithm and the developed algorithm is equally open. In the end, who do the best, and who can keep as the solution of the scene, who will stay. If everyone couldn’t reach the requirement, Ctrip will continue to training, respectively.

Gan believes, through this way of learning and competition, it can develop technology which may touch the ceiling in the scene, "every problem, finally to solve the scene under a fixed scene may be about the same, but since every company can become a company independently, who can get investment, and help other enterprises solve the problem. If they can also help Ctrip, we will be more open to look at this situation. At the same time, we also adhere to the path of self- development, and the ultimate goal is to solve the problems encountered by the business.”

Whether it is a huge amount of data and complex technical system, and to promote the efficiency of the existing customer experience, all of which makes Gan have the confidence to face comments from outside: I don't think the technical problems we need to solve is simple, and it won’t need too good technology, on the contrary, I think it may be the bias and misunderstanding the outsiders has for Ctrip technology in a long time.

And for the future, the meaning of technology to Ctrip is huge, expected by Gan. Built upon Ctrip’s advantages of services and business, as the amount of data is more and more big, with the new technology development, the future of the entire tourism industry can present technical drivers changing the trend of the travel experience totally. "Personally, I would be more willing to define Ctrip as a technology-driven company."