Managing Customer Experience In The Airline Industry
Introduction
For the airline industry, it’s very important to present a holistic view of the customer experience metrics across the enterprise to ensure consistency & improvement in the customer experience. Today, customer experience management is the buzz word across many industries, and airlines is no different. We have ourselves implemented CXM solutions in many organizations which have dedicated CX leaders who report directly to the head of the company. This increasing level of the top leadership’s involvement shows the importance of the CX to the bottom line. This underlines the importance of tracking airline customer experience. Successful organizations with operations spread across the countries have dozens of CX metrics each more important than the other to show whether the key functions are being handled with care. These metrics are not handled by the marketing department alone but they are distributed across customer service, finance department, & supply chain departments. So, we must get to measure these metrics across departments and the customer journey. In this blog, we will cover how to track customer experience in the airline industry.
How To Track Customer Experience in the Airline Industry?
Step 1. Choose the right customer experience tracking Solution
Why is a Customer Experience Management Solution important?
Airline industry with the intent to track customer experience in their organization must use the right CX tool which will ensure greater customer loyalty leading to more sales & brand advocacy. Today, it’s not just about having a tool which can meet your organization’s objectives, but it’s about something which can help you to stay competitive in the market. Therefore, it’s very important to choose just CX management software, otherwise, your organization’s Airlines customer relationship management initiative will be in jeopardy.
How to choose the Customer Experience Management Software?
CX managers will have to follow these steps to choose the right tool:
Shortlist the vendors. Get a list of software vendors who are offering CX management software specially for the airline industry.
Ascertain your company’s size & reach. Know how many customers your airline is handling. The future plans also matter. You are going to choose a future-proof solution, so keep your future plans & requirements in mind. Know from how many locations you are operating.
Ask the vendors to prepare a case study on how their solutions can help your company. You might have to share some information with the vendor, facilitating that as far as it sounds right.
Lean towards a solution which looks just for your company in terms of usability & scale. Apart from the features, ease of use also matters.
Finally, there are commercial aspects to consider. Keep in mind, it’s very important to have the right solution in place because today customers are not customers, they are not even guests, they are owners! Such an approach drives customer satisfaction in the airline industry.
Step 2: Implement the chosen Customer Experience Management Solution
These days, most organizations are leveraging SaaS to squeeze the most business value out of any project. The other thing being mobility. So, it’s quite likely that your chosen solution will come in the form of desktop application, web application, & mobile app for managing digital customer experience in airlines. Cloud has completely changed the way software solutions are being implemented; today, vendors host the solution on their servers making the implementation faster, fastening the access time, & making the clients worry-less about managing & updating the application. This also means that technical issues get resolved faster, sometimes instantaneously, without any hassles. Furthermore, these solutions are easily integratable with the existing applications in the organization’s IT ecosystem – And, you get all this for just a small, monthly subscription fee. So, where is the entry & exit barrier? – Nowhere, with the cloud.
Step 3: Start measuring the right metrics
Once the solution has been implemented, employees have been trained, & the management is onboard, it’s time for CX managers to get their acts together & start calculating the right metrics with the help of the solution. These are the metrics that one will have to calculate:
NPS (Net Promoter Score)
This is arguably the most popular customer experience metrics used by the companies to promote customer experience & customer experience innovation. NPS is short & simple for customers to answer & it’s very easy for the airlines companies to track. NPS is often used to rate the brand or a service in general. An increase or decrease of the NPS indicates the future revenue gain or loss for the airlines. One software solution – WovVProduct – which is most popular across the airline industry for measuring & tracking NPS is WovVXM- Customer Experience Management Solution from WovV Technologies.
CSAT (Customer Satisfaction)
This is an important metric to get things rolling. This is the most traditional metric which involves the explicit capture of survey questions focusing on determining satisfaction by using the airlines’ service. CSAT metrics can also involve implicit KPIs like service review ratings, timeliness of airline service, or onboard shopping experience.
CES (Customer Effort Score)
Yet another important CX metrics which is highly relevant for the airlines industry. These metrics indicate the effort customers have to put in to get their questions/issues/doubts resolved while dealing with the airline. Bad customer experiences are more toll taking than other issues & can totally put a customer off unless you are getting it right on the priority scale & focusing on it.
Customer loyalty/retention/churn
These are retrospective metrics, such as average tenure. They prove to be more predictive of the likelihood of a customer remaining a customer. Some examples are ticket purchasing frequency, use of different channels for booking, loyalty program participation, frequent flyer program participation & cancellation rates.
Reputation & brand
These metrics indicate the level to which customers are willing to recommend or endorse your brand & your services. Price sensitivity, sentiment analysis, trust ratings, & event participation are some of the examples of these metrics.
Conclusion
So, considering the requirements it goes without saying that WovVXM- Customer Experience Management Solution from WovVTech is arguably the best tool to measure & track customer experience in the airline industry. In many organizations, customer experience executives focus on only one or two metrics to summarize the whole of customer experience, this might not be the best approach. For this reason, WovVXM focuses on a complete set of important metrics to present the true picture. It audits all CX metrics across the entire organization. Get in touch with us for a free case study on how we can help your airline to measure & track your customer experience metrics for growth.
