To be successful as an airline it is not only important to fly from A to B as cheaply as possible and to be punctual. In today's highly competitive world, an airline needs to meet or exceed the customer expectations.
We are customer experience experts: we help your airline to gain and use customer insights, to implement personalized and digitalized services and to successfully leverage your ancillary revenues.
We will be happy to give you a concrete example:
Customer problem
- A large European airline had a huge problem: the number of denied boarding compensation cases increased drastically.
- The main driver was the EU regulation requiring higher compensation in the case of denied boarding due to overbookings, and delays.
- Executing the compensation process led to longer handling times at the gate/service desk (approx. seventeen minutes per passenger) and hindered other processes.
Approach
The purpose of the concept was to design a streamlined handling process as well as its digital IT support. The steps we took were straightforward:
- Conducting a field study
- Drafting the digitalized processes
- Recommending IT technical solutions
- Conducting a financial analysis
Recommendation
a. Digitalization
- Implementation of a self-service customer portal – access compensation options from everywhere at any time.
b. Product modification
- Offer rebates on future ticket purchases instead of fixed deductions of ticket rates.
- Limit the redemption options.
- Limit voucher redemption on a single ticket purchase transaction.
- Identify the ideal rebate level on the ticket purchase.
- Verify customer acceptance through customer satisfaction surveys targeted to affected passengers.
Impact on client’s business
- Reduction of cash compensations replaced by higher rate of vouchers - 5.27 million €
- Additional revenues via ticket up-selling - 0.13 million €
- Avoided loss of revenue by crowding out full-fare passengers - 0.09 million €
- Avoided costs for ancillary reimbursement by third-party purchases - 1.00 million €
