00:24:17 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
[00:24:17] S1: Yeah. AE, but both, know, early days. [00:24:20] S0: Yeah. Early days. I'm sure you did everything. Now you're president of the company, Palca traded. Was there a period, obviously linearly looks great, but was there a period, was there an instance where you thought you were gonna get fired?
00:24:34 · Michael Sindicich
[00:24:34] S1: Oh, fired? Yeah. Like, yeah, all the time. All the time. No, for doing something morally bad, no. And I think that's important when you're building a startup is basically hiring people that are so mission driven that if something feels off to the mission of what you're trying to do, you will be insistent and just crazy until it gets fixed. Our first value, anybody at Navan will be able to recite at any time, if you ask them what's the values, no one will know most of the values. They're gonna know the first one. It's all about the user, all the users, all the time. And so we wake up and go to sleep every day thinking about that there better not be any traveler that's stuck, any admin that can't do something, anyone who's having a bad experience with our platform. We want to make it better. We want to support them. Even if it's not our platform but your United fight gets canceled, we're there to support you. And that's the first one. Just for kicks, the second one is seriously fun. Those are the two that people will remember. And I think there's been times where that was tested at the user and I was probably a little aggressive for trying to fix it. But I would say nothing because something was ethically or anything like that wrong. The one that comes to mind is early days. A customer messaged me and was like, Hey, Michael. Your system's cool, but I run a company. And if I show up airport and I thought I booked a flight and I don't have the ticket, you're actually impacting my revenues, my customer relationships. My entire business is at risk if your thing doesn't work. And that was such a wake up call. This was like probably first six months of the company. And what I did is I then started tracking and worked with the engineers to log every single action in the product. And I wrote on the whiteboard at the company one weekend every single example of someone who tried to make a booking and whether it happened or failed. And I wrote it big on the whiteboard. And then that Monday morning, I called our CEO and our co founders into the room. And I said, What do you guys want me to do with this? This is so messed up. People weren't able to book. They were having errors. They were having cancellations. Nothing was working in the system or it was working half of the time. I remember I was really aggressive and it was a very aggressive conversation.
00:27:06 · Michael Sindicich, Miguel Armaza
In the end, they were both like, You're so right. We have to solve this. We have to fix this for our users, we fixed it. And one thing we monitor all the time now is booking errors and making sure that that ratio stays low. And to their credit, it's nothing to do with our solution. There's a lot of different players in this space and infrastructure and piping of systems and airline technology connected to GDS technology connected to us. But one thing that we're very, very insistent on is making sure that when people go to make a booking, the booking happens and actually they get ticketed. [00:27:44] S0: That's actually interesting that you track booking errors. I guess you can call it a KPI internally. What are some other KPIs that [00:27:54] S1: you track [00:27:55] S0: outside of revenue?
00:27:57 · Michael Sindicich
[00:27:57] S1: Well, actually, yeah, I was gonna say that the two most important things we track ahead of revenue is NPS and CSAT. And so we are really, really happy and proud to say that our CSAT is a 96%. This happens anytime you contact our support team or our agent, Ava, our AI agent Ava. And to have a 96 score, like think about when you call your travel agency, it's because your flight was canceled, delayed, you need to rebook, you need to collect an invoice from a hotel, you're not sure where your credit card is, whatever. And 96% of people are saying that it's five star service. And so we're very, very happy about that metric, and it's something we track all the time. It's also a big part of our ethos is the orchestration between when can an AI agent handle these tasks and when does it need to go to a human agent. And the last thing we want is for people to, you know, be on the phone screaming like, representative, representative. And so that kind of handoff is so seamless and so something that we focus on to deliver that really healthy score. The other one is NPS, so net promoter score. Our NPS is around 45. And if you think about traditional, you know, travel and expense management tools, typically they're around zero NPS score. Like, no one likes to use, you know, your traditional travel system. And so us focusing a lot on that is I think the two most important things that we do. And again, it ties back to our value of it's all about the user. Then comes, you know, the different things afterward, like revenue and gross booking volume and payment volume and some of these things.
00:29:33 · Miguel Armaza
[00:29:33] S0: So when I hear travel and expense software, you think of SaaS revenues. But in reality, about 90% of the company's revenue is transactional. Call it reoccurring. So help us understand a little bit of the structure of the company today, the main drivers, and yeah, maybe we'll start there and there's lot to talk about about the company.
00:30:04 · Michael Sindicich
[00:30:04] S1: Yeah. So we make revenue in a few different ways, but to your point, the majority of it is usage based. And we were never really a SaaS company. Sometimes SaaS is dead, maybe that was good for us. Now SaaS is kind of coming back, maybe, I don't know. The way we make revenue is by people using the solution. And what we'll charge is, one, think about us as a marketplace with a lot of suppliers. You've got millions and millions of hotels and different airlines and car rental companies. And these companies pay what's called a commission back to the travel agent. What they're doing is basically paying a commission to be in the platform, in the marketplace, accessible. But then, two, their support agents don't need to support it. So, for example, if a traveler books a flight on our platform, our travel agents support. They change that flight. They cancel the flight. They work with the traveler throughout that journey. And so that's a bigger part of our usage revenue is coming there, which is also nice because the customer is not paying for that. And it's revenue that we get to generate, which is cool. The suppliers are definitely customers of our platform, but I'm talking about a B2B company. And then what we'll also charge is a trip fee. And so when someone on our platform books a trip, traditional agencies would charge one fee if it's offline booking, like you called someone or emailed, a different fee if it's after hours, a different fee if you book just a hotel online. And it was this big menu that when we came to the market, we said, like, Enough with that. We want to be very transparent and show you exactly what you're paying. So we charge you one trip fee per whole trip. So that means if you're doing five multi city bookings and hotels and all that, but leaving, coming back, that's one trip. And you can call us as many times as you want. You can email us, whatever you want to do. So that's another part of our revenue. And then the other parts are like the SaaS licenses for the expense management software. So we charge, you know, per active user per month seat type transaction. And then we also charge... Or we don't charge. We make interchange from our credit cards. And so we we make, you know, interchange overall. We give a portion of that as a rebate back to the customer, and then we get to keep the difference of the interchange.