Andrew Harrison-Chinn Podcast Transcript
Andrew Harrison-Chinn joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Do you work in emerging tech, working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.coruzant.com/brand.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Andrew Harrison-Chinn. Andrew Harrison-Chinn is the Chief Marketing Officer at Dragonpass, where he leads global brand communications and thought leadership for the travel and lifestyle platform.
Dragonpass works with airports, financial institutions, and travel providers worldwide to improve how people move through and experience journeys from airport lounges to digital loyalty and access services. Before becoming Chief Marketing Officer, Andrew served as Dragonpass’ Global Managing director and CEO, overseeing international growth, commercial strategy, and market expansion across multiple regions.
His professional background spans communications, investment and retail banking, giving him a broad perspective on consumer trust behavior, and how technology reshapes service-led industries at scale.
Well, good afternoon, Andrew. Welcome to the show.
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Good afternoon, Brian. It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. You’re in London, in England, the UK. I am in Kansas City. So just a six hour difference, but I appreciate you navigating all the time zones, calendars, et cetera to get here. So, thank you, Andrew. Absolutely. I’m gonna jump into your first question here. You’ve led Dragonpass as CEO, global managing director and now the Chief Marketing Officer.
How has that end-to-end leadership perspective shaped the way you think about brand growth and customer trust?
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Yeah, so I was really privileged in the early days, Brian, to wear many hats. So, as a small organization, starting out with very little I wore hats of HR, customer support, operations, product sales, pretty much everything.
So, it allowed me to understand the challenges that each department has. Then how you weave those needs and interests together, right? And in building a global brand, it’s important to note as well that we’re very fortunate enough to have some really good competition in the market. So, when you’re number two, you’ve gotta work harder.
You’ve gotta work smarter, faster, more flexibly. Our potential clients and customers at the time were actually our greatest asset. So, we went out and we just listened. We said, what do you want? What do people like, where they felt the gaps were where there was room for improvement. And that feedback was actually our catalyst for innovation, which inevitably led us to co-create solutions that tackled both our client and our customer pain points.
And that allowed us really to scale up as a brand. And traditionally, we white labeled. So, our brand sat behind these really large behemoths in the world. You know, the likes of Visa, MasterCard, Barclays Bank across the a hundred countries that we’re now in. But their support, obviously in the co-creation of solutions to offer customer-centric products really helps us to grow and scale.
We’ve also traditionally been a brand associated with the underdog. Someone you know, who’s willing to go above and beyond to win. And that resonates really well with, with obviously many people in the market. And that’s really translated the way in which our brand has chosen to innovate. The end-to-end leadership perspective as you, as you ask about there from a brand growth and customer trust perspective, it’s really understanding the interests of the end-to-end, both internally and externally, and then how we deliver quality solutions and relevant solutions off the back of that.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I really appreciate that and I love how you talked about. You’ve held many roles early on from HR, et cetera, but you really learned how to weave these different roles. Departments together understanding the business better, but also of course bringing together a strong synergistic culture there.
What I really took away here is you really listened intently to your customers. It allowed you to provide that great service that you were able to scale. Now. Gosh, I think you said a hundred countries, so that’s amazing. I appreciate that. Thank you. So, Andrew Dragonpass works with airports, financial institutions and travel providers worldwide.
What are the biggest friction points in the modern travel journey that technology can realistically solve today?
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Yeah, it’s a good question. I would probably simplify it into two things. Transparency on one end and fragmentation on the other. Let’s start with it at the beginning of a customer’s journey, right?
So, our data actually shows that only 27% of customers know the extent of the benefits available to them. And this is either because these benefits are not communicated well enough by the end user, by the client, or a customer actually doesn’t know how to access the benefits. So, for us it was really leading with a digital first approach.
And that means we can consolidate all of these benefits into one place, which is usually via apps we create or via APIs that we create for our clients and, and we API into their environment. And then if the client wants, we can use data sets to present the most relevant products to the customers at the right time to the most relevant customers.
And this allows the clients to continuously evolve and refresh their propositions because as we know, the world is constantly changing. Customer needs, are constantly changing. So, for us, it’s how we support clients and customers on being able to engage better with the solutions. And obviously ideally it leads to a stronger NPS score as well for our clients.
So that’s really on the, on the client side is, that relevance, that differentiation, transparency, simplicity of access. But then on the supply side, it’s been an incredible journey for us. Because there are varying degrees of technology globally, particularly you take a look at airports, right?
Some of them are really, really antiquated legacy systems. Some have built these slick in-house systems, but inevitably this technology is fragmented and inconsistent. So, so what we do is we consolidate all of this into one platform. And then we present it in a way that is easy to digest. And what we found, both from a partner and a client perspective is sort of that simplification of complexity is really, really, really resonated During COVID we decided we were gonna aggregate fast track lanes around the world.
No one had actually done this at scale before, and we realized why is there are nine different ways in which you can consume this product from static codes to APIs. So our platform consumes this complexity. It simplifies it through this consistent user experience that we talked about. But then in addition to that, you need to be flexible on your monitoring systems.
In case someone sporadically decides to update their API certificates or, or runs out of code. So, the biggest friction points in modern travel journey that technology can realistically solve today is how you give transparency of what is available easy access to consume it. And then actually how you fra you, you connect all those fragmented environments into a simplified place and you build robustness, for the unseen you know, amidst the incredibly complex and fragmented environments.
It’s critical to ensure that when a customer goes to use a service, that there is that continuity of service and obviously, thus brand reputation too.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Breaking it down, transparency and fragmentation. You talked about, consolidating, making the customer experience the user experience much easier, simpler, convenient place.
Right. You talked about consolidation, also talked about the flexibility, the continuity, the reliability. Also a statistics I didn’t even know about. You mentioned only 27% of customers know the benefits they can participate in, and so you’re making that better so they can take full advantage, and I think that’s great.
You’re going the extra mile for the customer, which is really amazing from my standpoint. I talk a lot about customer experience here, so thank you. Andrew loyalty programs are evolving beyond break, excuse me. Beyond points and perks. How do you see the economics of loyalty changing as access, comfort, and personalization become more valuable than discounts?
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Yeah. Yeah. This, this is actually the question that drives us as a business not only keeping benefits relevant. Solving for that dichotomy between the customer experience and usage, right? The economics that you talk about there, the more you use something, the more expensive from a, on a cost line, it becomes, right, and the harder it is generally for a client to offer.
So, what we’ve been doing is how, trying to understand a, the relevance of solutions, how we connect supply chain to the demand, and how we create scalable, relevant solutions. If I go into, recently, we’ve conducted a global loyalty index to understand what actually makes people loyal. So, let’s start with the loyalty conundrum there.
What is it that makes people loyal? And you’d be surprised to hear that often it’s the unsexy stuff that really drives the highest value in loyalty per se. Not necessarily engagement, but loyalty. And that’s operations and customer support. So, when you have a question or something goes wrong. You need to have the ability to get an answer that quickly resolves your query and ideally puts you in the same or better position than, than prior to your query.
And with a higher cost to serve globally, this is becoming increasingly difficult for companies, which is why for us, our priority was actually mixing technology with those customer support agents to help anticipate and resolve in many instances, and of course, where possible the issues prior to engagement if needed.
With that being said, through the loyalty index, we actually found that personalization, as you’ve touched on there, Brian is very closely behind. It’s the ability for companies to understand what perks are relevant, as we touched on earlier and at what time do they need to be engaging with those customers, with those solutions to make sure that the consumer is going to engage and consume.
And that’s actually a lot where a lot of our AI investment is going in at the moment is how do we use data sets to synthesize, these, the complex supply chains and, and data sets and present customers with solutions that they love and they want to frequently use. Right? So, we also work with clients then to understand their commercial models, right?
Because you talk about the economics of, of both loyalty and how you balance that. We wanna understand their commercial models and how we can present this in a way that drives a better holistic outcome for clients and customers alike, right? When, when the tide rises, all ships rise together, as they say.
And an example of this is in our loyalty index, we found that 70% of customers, right, 70% of customers had been with their banks for over 10 years. So they would consider themselves really loyal. But when we looked into it, it was actually inertia that was driving this. Only 26% of those customers actually kept their money with their banks.
So, they were actually costing banks more than they were actually driving through commercial outputs. So, what we said is, okay, well how do we help you monetize these customers? How do we reward the right behaviors? So, we work with banks to understand. What offers do we reward for spend? For example, if they spend abroad, they make money.
So how do we create spend based rewards or how do we start to create minimum deposit rewards? So, when you’ve got a minimum deposit in your bank, actually you get access to a plethora of rewards. And then how do we start to work with supply chains to source discounts that drive engagement for them and cheaper solutions for our clients as well.
So, the economics really of loyalty, access, comfort, and personalization is really how you balance that customer experience with something that is relevant that clients and customers can afford, if that makes sense.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. No, I really appreciate that. You talked about solving between the customer experience and the usage.
How do you connect the supply chain to this demand? And basically, kind of paraphrasing what you said is what makes people loyal is that operations, the customer support, right? And a close second is personalization. And you help dial that in with the help of AI. Obviously today, we have a lot of that prevalent in everything that we do, so I really appreciate your insights
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: and also having a and, sorry, Brian, just.
Brian Thomas: Go ahead.
Also, just being a good product, naturally, you need to have a good product, but it’s really the, as I said, the unsexy stuff that we’ve found really drives that loyalty at your time of need. How are you there for a customer? How do you feed those inquiries, those challenges back to create a better solution and a better customer experience?
As you touched on earlier.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Andrew. Last question of the day as we look ahead, how will data, digital identity, and seamless access redefine the passenger experience over the next decade? And what should travel brands be investing in now?
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Yeah, it’s again, another very good question, Brian.
I think that first of all, let’s start with the basics, right? Like the, the must haves. So naturally robust cyber and infrastructure security standards that cater to regional requirements is a must, right? So, for example, we have data hosting in Saudi and China, in India and then you’re complying with GDPR from a, a UK and a European perspective.
And naturally there’s other requirements across many, many other regions. So. Doing the basics right is absolutely critical. And we’ve seen over the last, well, particularly 12 months, you know, these, these large hacks where customer’s data have been shared wider or field, which has damaged many of the brands who’ve been affected.
And naturally customers want to trust you and they wanna feel protected. So, in terms of that data is making sure that you look after it. And what we, again, found through the loyalty index was that when we asked customers, would you be open to sharing your data, majority of them said no.
When we said to them, if we gave you something to share your data, would you be open to it? And again, majority of them actually said, yes, we would. As long as it was looked after, it was trusted. And I knew what you were gonna do with that data. Then naturally bridging tech and customer support agents is critical.
As we, as we previously discussed, how do you make sure that your customers, when they have issues, are addressed instantaneously or you are anticipating them, right? Because things are naturally always going to go wrong in any business, right? So, making sure you’ve got a robust plan to cater when that does happen is critical.
Then from what we are doing at the moment is refining your traditional data models, right? You know, that is absolutely paramount. How do you use your data to drive better customer experience, to drive better commercial outputs, to drive better customer propositions? And that ability to capture, to process and to segment again with the right infrastructure in place is critical as well.
And this is where we’re investing a lot at the moment. So, you know, the ability to then vectorize our data. In order for, to empower AI in the most efficient way. And for us, you know, this opens up the ability for consumers to be able to talk to their data and data, to be able to talk back to them in a way that doesn’t break the bank through, through computational processing, right?
So, what this basically means is consumers can have instant personalized recommendations, that predictive service, real time problem resolution, all the things that we’ve talked about here in a way that is simple and in your palm digitally, which is absolutely critical. And then if we bridge the back to the front end, what we’ve seen is, investment in API ecosystems that flexibility and platform integrations, people don’t always work in one way.
So, if you can start to create relatively agnostic solutions, not to get too technical here. That provides flexibility in which brands and consumers can consume those experiences in a way that is convenient to them. That is absolutely critical and, and naturally mobile first experiences along with payment, innovation and embedded finances, a is a must.
Right. You touched on it; you know Brian earlier, is, you know, making the customer experience as relevant and seamless as possible. Is really paramount to the success of all of these brands, right? As well as the ability to anticipate the needs and to reward the right behaviors and, and naturally.
Predictive models can help here too, if brands are looking to invest in these particular areas, but where there are investment constraints, my personal favorite thing, and it’s perhaps a bit old school here, is just get out there and speak to your customers and your clients, right? Just understand.
What are their pain points? Track NPS if you can watch their behaviors. ’cause often what a customer says and what a customer does are two very different things. Understand, where there is an opportunity to refine that customer experience, to make their lives easier, to innovate in ways that actually you are anticipating their needs.
So, over the next decade, that’s truly where we believe that travel brands should be investing now is how do you make it as seamless as possible for customers with relevant solutions at the right times and when things go wrong. There’s a quick and effortless resolution for them.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And the big message I’m gonna take away, I just tell you right now, is really loving on your customer and I think that’s awesome. I really do. Yeah. But just a few things here I wanna highlight that you said is getting the basics right? Fundamentals that strong, robust infrastructure, security, compliance, et cetera. Treating the customers as priority, ensuring that top level support. And of course using data to drive better customer experience and then leveraging technology mobile first AI to better provide that better customers experience, service, personalization and even resolutions in this case.
So, I appreciate that, Andrew. It was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Andrew Harrison-Chinn: Yeah. Thank you so much, Brian. I really appreciate your time.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Andrew Harrison-Chinn Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
