In late January, Tushan Shanmugarajah, CEO and co-founder of Findmyfare.com, started seeing drops in sales to markets in South-east Asia. Thinking this was “something like SARS”, that it’d be contained, it switched marketing campaigns to Europe and the Middle East.
In February, it ran a campaign with Mastercard promoting India which was, at that time, still open for business.
“Then every region got hit and now we are literally at zero revenues, actually negative sales,” said Tushan, speaking to WiT from Colombo. “Our settlement to IATA was negative in February.”
Shareholders then started calling, asking how the company intended to survive. “They wanted a plan,” said Tushan, who returned from London to Sri Lanka in 2012 to start the local OTA.
On March 17, it closed its office and made everyone work from home. Thankfully, it had been using online platforms from a year ago and the team made the transition smoothly. “In Sri Lanka, people are still very used to working in offices and some companies are struggling with remote work because they may not have set up the necessary infrastructure or trained staff.”
Then it had to find a way to cut staff costs. It employs about 80 people, 45 of whom are travel consultants. Most of them had been hired last year and trained in the anticipation of healthy business in 2020.
“Since the Covid-19 outbreak, all the travel companies globally are cutting jobs. I was also forced to look at the option of downsizing the team to stretch the survival period in the current market condition. I felt really miserable to fire people at this much needed time, here in Sri Lanka there is no unemployment welfare,” said Tushan.
“It seemed such a shame too to let well-trained staff go.”
Tushan went on LinkedIn to see if he could find alternative projects to save some jobs. He created this post, asking, “Are you looking for additional resources during this time to support your business demand? We have 30+ well-experienced #customer_service_specialist available to work from home. Demand for travel services has dropped due to the #coronavirus #outbreak and believe it will remain low for the next few months. I would like to explore alternative options to put my team in the much-needed sectors until the travel business return to normality.”
Within a couple of hours, he got a call from an online pharmacy, healthnet.lk, and by end of day, he was on a call to finalise details to redeploy his team to the pharmacy. “Their demand was so high they couldn’t cope with demand and they needed 10 people right away.”
Today, 30 of his customer service team has been redeployed to the online pharmacy as well as a local pharmacy (Heathguard) with 21 branches, where their customer requests are being handled by Findmyfare’s call centre. It is also working with a local doctor service, ODOC.life, to help customers with their online appointment scheduling.
“Travel consultants are really good at customer service. They know how to handle complaints, how to empathise with customers. This is what’s needed at this time when people are feeling fearful in this medical crisis,” said Tushan.
“This is not about profit, but about saving jobs and also redeploying skills to areas which need it to help our country through this crisis.”
It’s allocated non-customer-facing teams on longterm projects. For example, its finance team is working on finance and work process automation, and leaders are undergoing leadership training courses. “It’s a good time to do some learning.”
Aware that it may be a long road ahead to eventual recovery – an audience poll conducted at WiT Virtual this morning at the investors session reckoned companies are going to need at least 12 months of runway to survive – Tushan said, “We are continuously brainstorming on Zoom. We don’t want to make quick, wrong decisions when it involves people’s lives. If it’s more than six months, then we have to find creative ways to keep people employed.”
Note: If you have got a story to share about how your travel company has done something different and creative to save jobs, or pivot to engage with customers at this point, please send in your experiences. Email me.
• Featured image is of the travel consultants at Findmyfare.com