The airline industry is clearly on the rebound, with over
two million travelers
recently passing through U.S. airports on a single Friday, for the first time since March 2020.
Yet in the post-pandemic world, customer journeys don't look different just owing to masking and social distancing. They look different days, probably weeks, in advance of the extra socks and a swimsuit being packed. The reason?
Long before the physical journey starts, the digital journey begins in earnest. And today, with digital customer experience top-of-mind, passengers will prefer flying on airlines that better fit all the moving parts of the digital customer experience together.
Digital empathy is in the air
Across all online sectors, and especially for more expensive items like airline tickets, post-COVID consumers are seeking greater
digital empathy
from service providers.
Airlines that successfully used real-time customer behavioral insights to build out such understanding came out of the 2020 crisis in a better starting position.
Even as their customers faced distressing uncertainty when the pandemic was at its peak, United Airlines was able to
create a cross-channel digital customer experience
that placed a capable, caring and responsive ethos at the core of their corporate values.
Similarly, American Airlines was able to
create greater customer empathy
by tracing friction responses like rage clicks back to the source, then more effectively prioritizing defect mitigation.
Today more than ever, passengers are simply unwilling to deal with friction points in their customer journey. Travelers know what to expect from digital journeys, demand no less, and are brutal in shifting their loyalties.
What specifically are passengers looking for, and how should airlines rise to the challenge of the new digital normal? Here are four good starting points:
1. Seamless: The new standard
The
2020 SITA Air Transport IT Insights
report found that passengers prefer digital interaction to face-to-face, and this trend continues to accelerate.
Yet even as airlines invest in replacing gate agents with self-service kiosks, and shift more interactions to mobile and web – digital interactions remain fragmented.
Today's travelers expect a seamless experience across all digital channels - desktop, native apps, kiosks, and call centers.
This requires an ever-deeper understanding of the digital customer journey, ever-closer monitoring of customer digital behavior, and – crucially – superfast prioritization and mitigation of friction when it is identified.
2. Digital upselling: A revenue opportunity
Airlines are learning what Quick Service Restaurants knew a decade ago: effective upselling is a massive revenue booster. And the good news is that – just like at
restaurants
- airline consumers respond to digital upsell offers more positively than to in-person offers.
Yet effective digital upselling of ancillary products like seat upgrades, priority boarding, prepaid meals, and extra baggage allowances demands an in-depth understanding of customer profile, behavior, and experience.
It’s crucial for airline teams to be able to track conversion rates for each upselling category and at each stage in the customer journey.
There’s nothing more frustrating than having a team develop a meaningful product, marketing campaign success, and an excited customer that then disasterously runs into a digital roadblock such as a technical error. It’s 2021, and business success is more than just creating a delightful physical product to buy, but perfecting the digital experience.
This means quickly identifying UX or technical issues that negatively impact ancillary sales, then prioritizing and rolling out fixes based on actual potential revenue loss.
3. Loyalty: More important than ever
As lockdown-weary travelers emerge from their homes to enjoy long-postponed vacations, pricing remains a sensitive issue.
Personal finance site
WalletHub
found that the average airline rewards program can lower fares by some 11% - and this makes accrued loyalty points a key element of traveler decision-making.
To maximize the revenue benefits of loyalty programs, airlines need to intelligently monitor the digital signals that could point to upsell and cross-sell opportunities during loyalty shopping. To continue delivering value to loyal customers, airlines should strive to continuously enhance the user experience of their loyalty programs.
4. Third-party services: an emerging revenue source
As the economy rebounds from the pandemic, airlines will need to shift their roadmaps to maximize profitability. Business travel - previously the bread and butter of most airlines – is still ramping up and airline execs don’t expect it to fully recover
until this Fall at the earliest
.
Leisure travel, on the other hand, is bouncing back in a big way. This means that airlines need to readjust their business plans and reimagine the customer journey.
By way of example, earlier this year
JetBlue announced the launch of Paisly
. This new service offers JetBlue customers personalized recommendations for hotel stays, car rentals, theme park tickets, and more.
For airlines expanding into OTA services, the customer journey will only continue to grow in complexity and require ever more intricate monitoring and response mechanisms.
The bottom line
By considering the digital customer journey as a crucial part of the actual journey, airlines can re-prioritize the way they understand their customers.
Advanced technology enables airlines to harness the power of real-time customer behavior insights, reduce digital friction faster across multiple touchpoints, respond to upsell opportunities more effectively, and – most crucially - breed the digital empathy that ensures loyalty and safeguards online reputation.