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Mapping:
A Walk In Customers Shoes
The Experience Matters To Airline Customers Just As Much As The Destination
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illions of customers have
boarded airplanes this year
and have embarked on a physical journey to a destination for
multitudes of reasons business travelers, families with
children, couples traveling on adventure
vacations, guests with special needs. Each
one of these, and myriad other travel personas, has a very different expectation of
the brand promise that an airline presents.
An airlines brand exhibits its commitment to customers so they know what to
expect. However, for many, the first time
customers interact with an airlines brand
in person, when it feels real, is when a gate
agent or a flight attendant greets them as
they are boarding the aircraft.
Based on this reality, how do you know
if your customers have the same expectations of your brand at this touchpoint as
they did when they were searching for the
best itinerary, making their reservation or
attempting to check bags? Are you willing
to take the chance that you did not meet
their needs and they are sharing their lessthan-desirable experience with others?
Social media allows customers to share
the good and the bad with the world.
Customers advocate when things are good,
and they promote your product to others
through recommendations. They also have
a story to tell when things do not go so
well.
A bad customer experience posted on
twitter, Facebook and various other social
media channels can be very detrimental to
your brand. In fact, statistics show that:
It takes 12 positive experiences to make
up for one negative one.
91 percent of unhappy customers will
not return to your airline after a bad
experience.
As an airline executive, do you know
what your customers expect from your
company from the moment they are
inspired to travel through to the end of the
journey when they are reminiscing with
their friends and family? How many opportunities has your airline had to interact
with customers before they get to the end
of their journey? How important are your
customers to your airline, and how do you
recognize the needs of each one?
Airlines today are clearly starting to
organize around the customer. Titles
such as vice president of guest experience
and chief customer experience officer,
which have existed in many industries
since the 1990s, are now emerging in the
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ASCEND I INDUSTRY
airline world. Airlines realize that ownership of the customer has become just as
important as operations.
Understanding who your customers are
and why they do business with your airline
supports your longer-term vision for the
business and the goal of keeping customers for life (lifetime value). However, to
solidify your customer experience strategy
and then fulfill that strategy, it is vital to
take a walk in your customers shoes.
How you treat each customer should be
different once you know his needs. This
is established through customer journey
mapping.
Developing Personas
Before beginning the process of customer journey mapping, it is important to
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Limit Number Of Personas When creating personas to support a customer journey mapping strategy,
airlines should limit the number of personas (special needs travelers, family travelers, leisure travelers,
business travelers, etc.) to between four and seven.
Inspiration
Planning
Booking
Purchase
Pre-Trip
Departure
In-Flight
Post-Trip
Impacting The Customer Experience There are several steps that make up a customers end-to-end
air travel journey, from the time she begins thinking about taking a trip through to the end of the trip
and beyond. Taking a customer journey mapping approach, airlines can focus on the touchpoints most
important to individual customers based on their identified persona.
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(Q) In-Flight
21
Departing
13
8
3
Special Needs
Special needs customers, such as
someone traveling with a wheelchair,
are concerned with connections and the
physical movement through the process of
checking in and getting through security. In
flight, they expect crew awareness of their
special needs.
0
Importance To Personas When considering the in-flight step of the customer journey, business
travelers and families traveling with children indicated that in-flight services and amenities were more
important than other aspects of their trip. However, leisure travelers and those with special needs did
not rate the in-flight portion of their trip as high when weighed against other touchpoints throughout the
travel journey.
Persona
Importance
Leisure traveler
Business traveler
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Importance Of Personas To determine the importance of each persona, an airline must determine
how many elements in each step of the travel journey are important to each persona. In this case, the
business traveler indicated that 13 elements were important, compared to three areas of importance
for the special needs traveler, five for families traveling with children and eight for leisure travelers. It is,
therefore determined that regarding this particular step in the journey the business traveler persona has
the highest level of importance.
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Customer Acquisition/Retention
Customer Value
Some customers drive more value to your
airline than others. An airline can determine
customer value in a number of ways, including:
Customers who drive additional revenue for
the airline through the purchase of ancillaries
and upgrades;
Existing customer value based on the data
derived from information about the most
recent trips, the frequency of trips and the
price paid;
Likelihood to recommend;
A combination of all of the above.
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Interacting With Customers Customer journey mapping enables an airline to identify the touchpoints
for which individual customers want and expect airline interaction. This approach helps airlines verify
what is working well, what isnt and where they need to invest.