Experience in Customer Experience.
Data mining applications in an airline company.
Author
Edoardo Lolini
Academic Tutor
Prof.ssa Anna Monreale
Company Tutor – Air Italy
Rossen Dimitrov
Academic Year 2017/2018
Master Universitario di II livello
Management, Innovazione e Ingegneria dei Servizi – MAINS
ABSTRACT
In this script I will present the results of my project work in an airline company. After a short overview on the company’s history, fleet, and network, I will report the main theoretical framework on Customer Experience, customer journey, and touch points management, related to the airline industry. It emerges that nowadays exist some interesting trends for improving Customer Experience in the sector and, in my work, I will explore two possible applications of the one that, in my opinion, present the most interesting perspectives. In the work that follow, I will report the principal results of two Data Mining applications which can help the company to manage Customer Experience and Operations. In the first one I have performed a web scraping on TripAdvisor reviews related to the company and the sentiment analysis on such reviews; in the second one I have performed a clustering analysis on flights in term of in-flight catering service.
Key words:
Customer Experience, Customer Journey, Touch Points, Service Management, Airline Industry, Data Mining, Web Scraping, Text Mining, Sentiment Analysis, Machine Learning, Clustering, k-means, R
SUMMARY
INTRODUCTION 1
CHAPTER I AIR ITALY: COMPANY OVERVIEW 3
CHAPTER II CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN AIRLINES 9
CHAPTER III DATA MINIG APPROACH FOR CX 29
3.1. Sentiment analysis on online reviews 29
3.2. Clustering on in-flight catering service 47
CONCLUSIONS 70
REFERENCES WEB SITES
List of Figures
Figure 1 – Air Italy Timeline 6
Figure 2 – Air Italy Group 6
Figure 3 – Air Italy Network Map 8
Figure 4 – Touch Points for Airline Company 13
Figure 5 – Customer Journey 15
Figure 6 – Travel Personas 17
Figure 7 – Air Travel Journey 17
Figure 8 – Customer Journey Mapping 21
Figure 9 – Customer Experience Spectrum 23
Figure 10 – Airline Industry Trends 28
Figure 11 – TripAdvisor review example 30
Figure 12 – Reviews 2018 34
Figure 13 – Covariation among variables 36
Figure 14 – Flowchart of text analysis (1/2) 37
Figure 15 – Top words 2018 38
Figure 16 – Flowchart of text analysis (2/2) 39
Figure 17 – Common words that contribute to sentiment (“bing” lexicon) 40 Figure 18 – Frequencies per type of sentiment (“bing” lexicon) 41 Figure 19 – Common words that contribute to sentiment (“nrc” lexicon) 42 Figure 20 – Frequencies per type of sentiment (“nrc” lexicon) 43
Figure 21 – World cloud 43
Figure 22 – Term frequency distribution 44
Figure 23 – Word preceded by “not” and by “negation” (“afinn” lexicon) 45
Figure 24 – Words relationship 46
Figure 25 – Exploratory analysis (1/2) 55
Figure 26 – Exploratory analysis (2/2) 56
Figure 27 – Correlation matrix 57
Figure 28 – Sum of Squared Error 59
Figure 29 – Clusters population 60
Figure 30 – K-means centroids 61
Figure 31 – Caterer per cluster 63
Figure 32 – Type of aircraft per cluster 64
Figure 33 – Departure airport per cluster 65
Figure 34 – Arrival airport per cluster 66
Figure 35 – Catering preparation per cluster 67
Figure 36 – Business class passengers per cluster 68
Figure 37 – Economy class passengers per cluster 69
List of Tables
Table 1 – Air Italy Network 7
Table 2 – Air Italy Fleet 7
Table 3 – Relevant variables analysis (whole dataset) 32
Table 4 – “Best” lexicon 40
Table 5 – Bigrams (Top 10) 44
Table 6 – Trigrams (Top 10) 44
Table 7 – Types of catering preparation 50
Table 8 – Types of meals 50
INTRODUCTION
In an increasingly mobile and interconnected world, customers’ needs, and behaviors continuously change and with them the opportunity of interaction between customers themselves, and between customers and brands. Business success, nowadays, depends in first place on how firms relate to their customers. People increasingly make their purchase decisions on the experience that live in the interaction with the brand, and not only following the influence of marketing actions. Therefore, the Customer Experience became a cornerstone of today business success that no longer depends only on its product and service but on how they are “experienced” by users, before, during, and after the purchase. This have an impact on the entire organization from marketing and communication, to post-sale and assistance, from supply chain and production, to HR, etc., involving also change in processes and strategies. And this is what happened and is still happening in Air Italy.
The company, that could in same way be viewed as a young start-up with a story of more than 50 years, is in a period of change and grow. In fact, the old Meridiana is going through changes in all in business units, passing from a kind of service that satisfy defined types of customer needs to one of a higher level. This is principally due to main facts: the first one is the expansion to international new routes for the company such as Bangkok, New York City, Miami, Delhi, and Mumbai that opened in 2018; and the second one is the entry in the corporate structure of Qatar Airways which is one of the top airline company in the world according to Skytrax World Airline Awards ranking. The centrality of THE customer for this new company is evident at all levels, starting from the marketing strategy, passing through on-ground and in-flight services, and as regard the pre- and post- flight services.
During my work period in Air Italy in the Customer Experience area, I have seen the growth of various offices, staring from revenue management to marketing, and from on-ground operations to in-flight service. All these offices are passing through a period of increasing complexity in organizational and operational terms, due to the increasing complexity of the business itself. Customer journey and touch points management are the core of the “new” Air Italy business, and, related to them, customer satisfaction is central.
Nowadays technologies offer various number of possibilities to monitor and analyze customer satisfaction, among other, Data Mining techniques, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence have the most promising perspectives. In the work that follows, I will report the principal results of two data mining applications which can help the company to manage customer experience and operations.
In the first one I have performed a web scraping on TripAdvisor reviews related to the “new” Air Italy and the sentiment analysis on such reviews. The aim of this activity is to provide a powerful instrument to the company in order to understand the work done in implementing the Customer Experience strategy and to identify the areas and touch points that need an intervention of improvement. In the second one I have performed a clustering analysis on flights in term of in-flight catering service. This kind of activities could help the in-flight catering service operation office to better analyse the distribution of the catering service in their flights, profiling and grouping flights in terms of provision requirements, and ultimately highlighting hidden patters into data.
The work is structured as follows: in the first chapter I will present the main phases of company history from the very beginning to today; in the second chapter I will present the theoretical background of customer experience with a focus on airline industry highlighting the most innovative and technology advanced trends in the sector; and in the last chapter I will present the results of data mining analysis.
CHAPTER I – AIR ITALY: COMPANY OVERVIEW
AIR ITALY S.p.a. is an Italian airways company fully owned by AQA Holding (a newco owned by 51% Alisarda and 49% Qatar Airways). The Company’s headquarter is in Olbia – Costa Smeralda Airport and its principal hub in Milano – Malpensa Airport. Currently, the Company is the second largest airline in Italy, following Alitalia, Italy's flag carrier, and the 38th largest airline in Europe.
The Company born up with the name Alisarda on 29March 1963. It was founded by the Prince Karīm al-Husaynī, better known as Imam Aga Khan IV. The Company was born with the principal aim to promote development and tourism of Costa Smeralda in Sardinia. It stared the air taxi operations on April 1964 from Venafiorita Airport, in the south of Olbia. On 3 May 1991, the Company changed its social denomination in to Meridiana S.p.a.
In December 2006, Meridiana took over the majority share package of the airline company
Eurofly, starting an integration process completed on 28 February 2010 with the born of Meridiana fly S.p.a. e Meridiana Maintenance S.p.A. The two new society incorporate
respectively the flight branches and the technical branches of Meridiana and Eurofly.
After this integration, the company Meridiana S.p.A. has become a holding company that controls the airline company, the maintenance company and the management company of Olbia Airport, Geasar S.p.a.
On 19 July 2011, Meridiana announced an integration and acquisition plan for Air Italy, an Italian airline set up in 2005. From September of the same year, commander Giuseppe Gentile, founder and owner of Air Italy, become Chief Executive of the two airline companies of the holding Meridiana S.p.A., becoming a partner at the same time. In 2013, the integration plan ended with the acquisition of the 100% Air Italy share, and the Meridiana Group born. For the first period, the Group worked with separate Meridiana fly and Air Italy brands, keeping the trade union and managerial realities separated.
In January 2013, following disappointing financial results, the worsening of the group's debt situation and disagreements with Prince Aga Khan, Giuseppe Gentile left the position of Chief Executive, at the same time leaving the company. Roberto Scaramella, head of the Aviation sector of the Akfed Fund1 took his place. The Ismaelite prince, who fifty years before had created Alisarda from scratch, took over the company in a period of extreme crisis recapitalizing it of about € 100.000.000.2
1 Aga Khan Fund for economic development.
2 Source: https://www.ilfattoquotidiano.it/2013/01/16/meridiana-ritorno-dellaga-kahn-lad-gentile-se-ne-va-con-buonuscita-milionaria/471089/
After a first period of distinction between the two companies, a rebranding operation started. From March 2013, the Meridiana Group adopts common livery and brand for the two companies, making Air Italy and Meridiana fly aircraft operators of the same trademark. Thus, from 2013, all flights were operated under the name "Meridiana" with IATA IG and ICAO ISS. Thanks to the merger with the Eurofly carrier and the acquisition of the Air Italy Company, Meridiana in recent years has consolidated a very important presence in the international leisure segment continuing to expand to medium and long-haul holiday destinations and collaborating with all the major tourist operators of the national market.
Following the resignation of CEO Roberto Scaramella, on 18 November 2014, the board of directors of Meridiana, chaired by Marco Rigotti, appointed Richard W. Creagh as managing director and Colin Smith and Fabian Bachrach as members of the board of statutory auditors. Furthermore, from 17 December 2014, the holding Meridiana S.p.A. has changed its name becoming Alisarda S.p.A.
On 14 July 2016, Qatar Airways signed an agreement for the purchase of 49% of the company Meridiana. The agreement has allowed the revitalization of the airlines after years of crisis, thanks to an industrial plan that aims to restore the debts of the group and grow the brand. In April 2016, the managing director Richard W. Creagh resigned. He was substituted by interim president Marco Rigotti, waiting for the conclusion of the negotiations with Qatar Airways. The group had a period of adjustment and revival in the hands of the Aga Khan, which aims to efficiency and savings, waiting for a partial purchase agreement by investors.
On 28 September 2017, Qatar Airways officially took over 49% of AQA Holding, a new company owned by Alisarda S.p.A. (51%) and Qatar Airways (49%) created specifically for the new management of Meridiana. The Company officially born up on 19 February 2018, during a press conference in Milan, announcing the future of Meridiana by merging the airline and its subsidiary to create the “new” Air Italy.3
The focus of the company was to introduce a new Italian airline, which would be stable to be the future flagship carrier of Italy. The plan also introduces a new brand image, new cabin experience, new airport lounge, new airplanes4 and new destinations.5
3 Source: https://www.airitaly.com/cms/deploy/1/IGGJ_InvestorRelations/EN/doc/investor_comunicatistampa/AIRITALY _press%20release_19.02.2018.pdf 4 Source: https://www.corriere.it/cronache/18_febbraio_19/addio-meridiana-ecco-air-italy-a6075c80-156c-11e8-83e1-221a94978c8b.shtml 5 Source: https://www.repubblica.it/economia/2017/12/15/news/meridiana_qatar_svela_il_nuovo_network_piu_aerei_ e_rotte_low_cost-184197393/
All official branding and business of the new Air Italy took effect on 01 March 2018. The Meridiana IATA, ICAO, and AOC code merged into the new Air Italy.
On 18 April 2018, the airline welcomed Neil Mills as Chief Operating Officer (COO) who worked with the recently bankrupt airline Air Berlin,6 and introduced Rossen Dimitrov as Chief Customer Experience Officer (CCEO), on 22 April 2018.7
From 1 March 2018, Air Italy started fly operation with the first flight, took off at 02:00 (UTC + 1) and carried out by a Boeing 767-300ER between Milan – Malpensa Airport, in Italy, and the International Airport of Mombasa, in Kenya with the IG code, maintained by Meridiana. From the same day, the web site reported the new company name with the colors and the company logo. On 1 June 2018, Air Italy made the first international flight between Milan Malpensa Airport and the John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York City in the United States, using an Airbus A330-200 with the colors and the official airline logo. The flight also marked the launch of Air Italy’s new seatback entertainment platform, onboard amenities and meals services.
On 3 October 2018, Air Italy Chief Operating Officer (COO), Neil Mills, resigned due to personal reason. Rossen Dimitrov, formerly Air Italy CCEO, become the airlines new COO effective immediately.
Beginning from May 2018, Air Italy announced growth towards new, medium and long-haul domestic destinations from Milan Malpensa, which reflects an important strategic shift for the company. In particular, these are the connections from Milan Malpensa to Rome, Naples, Palermo, Catania and Lamezia Terme, planned to allow optimal connections with new intercontinental flights such as New York, Miami, Bangkok, Mumbai and New Delhi. Currently, the Air Italy network also includes international direct flights from Milan Malpensa to Accra, Cairo, Dakar, Havana, Lagos, Mombasa, Moscow, Zanzibar, and, to and from Olbia Costa Smeralda, scheduled flights to Rome, Milan Linate and connections season to many national and European destinations.
Air Italy’s fleet, currently comprising 8 Boeing 737 NG and 3 Boeing 767-300, will be progressively renewed with 8 new aircraft 3 brand new Boeing 737 MAX 8 and 5 Airbus A330-200 joining during 2018, and with the full retirement of the B767-300 by the end of 2018.
6 Source: https://www.airitaly.com/cms/deploy/1/IGGJ_InvestorRelations/EN/doc/investor_comunicatistampa/AIR%20I TALY_Press%20release,%20April%2018%202018.pdf 7 Source: https://www.airitaly.com/cms/deploy/1/IGGJ_InvestorRelations/EN/doc/investor_comunicatistampa/AIR%20I TALY_Press%20release%2030%20Apr%202018.pdf
Figure 1 – Air Italy Timeline
Figure 2 – Air Italy Group8
NETWORK
ITALIA
- Bologna – BLQ - Catania – CTA
- Lamezia Terme – SUF - Milano – LIN/MXP/BGY - Napoli – NAP - Olbia – OLB - Palermo – PMO - Roma – FCO AMERICA - Miami – MIA - New York – JFK AFRICA - Accra – ACC - Cairo – CAI - Dakar – DSS - Lagos – LOS - Mombasa – MBA - Sharm El Sheikh – SSH - Zanzibar – ZNZ ASIA - Bangkok – BKK - Mumbai – BOM - Delhi – DEL
Table 1 – Air Italy Network9
THE FLEET
Boeing 737 MAX 8 (2 in service, 18 ordered)
The new aircraft Boeing 737 MAX 8 features modern and spacious cabins and efficient engines that save fuel consumption and increase operational efficiency. The aircraft will progressively replace the Boeing 737 NG of Air Italy fleet, being the first Italian airline to fly with the 737 MAX 8. Seats: 16 Business Class, 162 Economy Class
Airbus 330-200 (4 in service, 1 ordered)
Twin-engine aircraft used in long-haul routes, modern, efficient and environmentally friendly. The Airbus A330 operates in a double Economy and Business configuration. Thanks to the modern and ergonomic design guarantees a comfortable and relaxing journey. The aircraft offers satellite Wi-Fi and usb connectors on all seats.
Seats: 24 Business Class, 228 Economy Class
Boeing 767 (2 in service, phasing out)
Long-haul twin-engine aircraft, the Boeing B767 is a safe, reliable and versatile airplane. This versatility allows to effectively serve both the medium haul routes and the long-haul ones across the north Atlantic and the Pacific.
Boeing 737 (7 in service, to be replaced)
The 737 – a short-to-medium-range airplane – grounded on a key Boeing philosophy of delivering value added to airlines with reliability, simplicity and reduced operating and maintenance costs.
Table 2 – Air Italy Fleet10
9 Source: https://www.airitaly.com/it/chisiamo/Compagnia_Meridiana_cargo.aspx (update at 31 October 2018) 10 Source: https://www.airitaly.com/en-en/company_informations/fleet.aspx
CHAPTER II – CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN AIRLINES
In an increasingly mobile, interconnected and multi-channel world, user’s needs and behaviors continuously change and with them new opportunities for interaction and relationship with brands arise. The Customer Experience (CX) is undoubtedly today a cornerstone of the business, on which depends the success of a company. Different sources argue that business success today depends in the first place on how an enterprise relates to its customers.
People interact, communicate and spend money no longer following only the influence of advertising messages and marketing actions, but rather by virtue of the experiences that live in the interaction with brands. It is an important change of perspective because, from this point of view, the success of a company no longer depends only on its product and service, which obviously remain as basement, but on how they are “experienced” by users, before, during and after the purchase. This have an impact on the whole organization and on every single division, from marketing and communication, to post-sale and assistance, from supply chain and production to HR, etc., involving also change in processes and strategies.
Nowadays, “… customers expect personalized experiences (offers, contents, tailor-made products, etc.), transparent communication (prices, conditions, changes to the service, etc.), efficient delivery (rapid deliveries, real-time information, etc.), and immediate satisfaction. There is no doubt that Customer Experience represent the new competitive arena and the first truly distinctive asset for companies, outweighing the structural characteristics of a product, such as quality and price.”11 In other words, in the “experience” economy, the differentiating
element for a company is represented by the experiential value that is able to guarantee to its users/customers, a value that can no longer be founded only on the product or service, but which must be built and managed around people's needs, expectations and desires.
Ultimately, Customer Experience could be defined as “the total experience that customers have throughout their relationship with the company”. Gartner12 defines Customer Experience as
“the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.” In the same fashion, Meyer and Schwager (2017) define Customer Experience “… as the internal and subjective response customers have to any direct or indirect contact with a company”.13
11 Source: P. Capaccioni (2017) L’era della Customer Experience. Come i brand creano esperienze di eccellenza: le
dinamiche del mercato italiano, Harvard Business Review Italia, 6, pp. 1-64.
12 Source: https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/customer-experience/
13 Source: C. Meyer, A. Schwager (2007) Understinading Customer Experinece, Harvard Business Review, 85, 2, pp. 116-157.
Thus, starting from the point of view of the user/customer and of what he/she wants, we could define the Customer Experience as the sum of the experiences, both positive (like emotions, memories, satisfactions) and negative (complaints or requests for help) that a subject matures and lives in its interaction with a brand along all the phases of its relationship.
In this conception, a good customer experience means that the individual's experience during all points of contact with a brand matches the individual's expectations.
Here, it is important to know in which way an individual form him/her experience. Which are the points of interaction between user/customer and the company? How can they be used to monitor and increase customers’ satisfaction?
Any situation in which a customer come in contact or interact with a brand/company, whether it be person-to-person, through web site, app, with physical objects, or whatever, can be defined as Brand-Customer Touch Point. The term describes “… a single perception of a brand by a stakeholder (customers, suppliers, partners, employees, and owners). … are the gates to perception of the brand performance and brand messages. They are what makes appreciation and added value of a brand possible …”.14 Touchpoints allow customers to have experiences every time they “touch” any part of the product, service, brand or organization, across multiple channels and various points in time.15 Touch points have the ability to influence customers’ opinions and perceptions in every step of the buying or intent to purchase process. However, these opinions and perceptions are highly dependent on individual persons. More specifically, a person can have a positive or a negative impression over the same touchpoint depending on him or her attitude, personal nature, and other factors.16 Obviously, in this regard, the ultimate goal of touchpoints design is form positive impressions over target customers, in order to create the opportunity for them to choose the company’s brand over another competitor.
In this sense, a touch point is not only advertising, public relation, web site, etc., but it is actually every thing, every person and every message that a customer “touches” and which communicates something positive or negative about the brand and ultimately the organization. The appearance and behavior of service employees, the design of a product as well as the package, tone of voice of the phone or attitude of customer care employees, etc., communicates many things about the organization to customers.
14 Source: https://www.brand-trust.de/en/glossary/brand-touchpoints.php
15 Source: L. G. Zomerdijk, C. Voss (2010) Service Design for Experience-Centric Services, Journal of Service Research, 13, 1, pp. 67-82.
16 Source: C. Meyer, A. Schwager (2007) Understinading Customer Experinece, Harvard Business Review, 85, 2, pp. 116-157.
The main challenge here is how to plan, structure, and manage these touch points in the best way possible in order to ensure customer satisfaction.
In order to start on the right foot is useful to categorize touch points, subdividing them according to the “origin” subject and the level of control or influence by the company. There exist four main touch point categories:17
• Company-created Touch Points
are planned messages, such as advertisement, news releases, brochures, package, and store decoration. Their main advantage is that they could be highly controlled by the company.
• Intrinsic Touch Points
are interactions with a brand required during the process of buying or during the act of purchasing a product or service. Most of them are connected with customer service. These touch points are often human oriented, such as messages being communicated between customer service operator or staff and actual customers. This type of touch point is vital for communicating a brand's message and modus operandi. They send powerful messages because they are generally personal and occur in real time. In the case of packaged goods, the package itself is an intrinsic touch point. How easy it is to open, to reseal, and to dispose of all send messages about the brand. Also, this kind of touch points could be highly controlled by the company.
• Unexpected Touch Points
are unanticipated references to a brand that are beyond the control of company. They are either positive of negative. Mainly they refer to personal communication and word-of-mouth between customers or other stakeholders of a brand (investors, analysts, employees, suppliers, distributors, and government officials). Unexpected positive wom messages from any of these sources can be powerful testimony on behalf of the brand. • Customer-Initiated Touch Points
are situations that occur when a customer contacts directly a company, without purchase. Unlike other touchpoints, they are created solely by customers relaying on the experiences they received from the brand/company directly back to the brand/company. These are particularly difficult to control and be managed, but they can bring a positive message to customers through actions such as a help desk or suggestions.
17 Source: https://rsmus.com/our-insights/newsletters/eclubnews/touch-points-defining-various-forms-of-contact-with-members.html
Taking into account the above categorization, it is evident that touch points in any case are the front-line to deliver customer experience. Lack of knowledge about the company’s touch points means that it is implicitly ceding control of something that could influence customers’ experience and perceptions of its brand to something else. Even if the Customer Experience strategy of the company is well defined, the implementation of that strategy is dependent on the exact knowledge of the touchpoints, and of how well they meet customer needs. So that, a great starting point in defining a CX Strategy is Touch Points Mapping.
In this framework, it interesting to think about all the possible touch points that an airline company could have. Here, the principal touch points are divided in three main categories according to the kind of source, namely human, digital, or of other kind (Figure 4):
• Human Touch Points
This category groups all touch points in which there is person-to-person interaction between brand/company and consumers or between consumers and other consumers. For example, all the interaction between passengers and ground service crew or in-flight service crew, and word-of-mouth between two persons who speak about the brand/company fall in this category.
• Digital Touch Points
This category group all touch points in which there is no direct interaction between two persons, but instead there is a human-to-machine interaction. For example, all the interaction between a person and Chabot, e-mail, newsletter, blogs, etc. fall in this category.
• Other Touch Points
This category aims to group all the touch points that do not belong to the other two categories. More physical and static touch points like advertisement, merchandising, and marketing and other static touch point fall in this category.
This categorization would be useful from at least three main points of view. First, and more important, it will help to align the company brand strategy with the service provided for each touch points, and ultimately with the experience that customers will receive and feel. This have the aim to create a compact and coherent strategy of perceptions for the company and help individuals to understand better which kind of product/service they are buying. Second, and related, it helps the company to focus on the touch points considered more relevant from the user point of view in terms of service (self-service, super-service, etc.). Ultimately, as we will see subsequently, it will help a service designer to build and provide an efficient system of service.
Figure 4 – Touch Points for Airline Company18
Once the company have identified its touch points, understand their importance for the costumers, and mapped all the relevant ones (controlling those it can, and influencing those it can not) the road to better serve customers, deliver a better customer experience, and drive customer loyalty became less steep. However, touch points mapping is only the starting point of a more complex process that takes the name of Costumer Journey Mapping.
A Customer Journey Mapping is the process of tracking and describing all the experiences customers have as they encounter a service or set of services, taking into account not only what happens to them, but also their responses to these experiences. It is about knowing what happens to customers when they interact with you, how they react, and how it makes them feel every step of the way. A customer journey map shows the story of the customer's experience. It not only identifies key interactions that the customer has with the organization, but it also brings user's feelings, motivations and questions for each of the touchpoints.
18 Readapted from:
https://dailybitsof.com/courses/growth-by-design/posts/what-are-your-brand-touchpoints
When a Customer Journey starts? When it ends? Which are the most important steps of the journey? How you can map it? Moreover, is customer journey mapping useful to build and influence customer satisfaction? In which ways?
First of all, a Customer Journey can be interpreted as the itinerary that the customer “travels” when he establishes a relationship with a company over time and in the different points of contact, both offline and online. Thus, it represents the "story of the relationship" between a customer and the brand/company. In a broad sense, a Customer Journey starts when the customer feels a need to be satisfy with a good or a service of a company and choose to purchase it. And ends with the experience of that product or service.
However, customer journey maps will differ between industries, companies and even customers. In order to create a proper customer journey map, you first need to understand the motivations of your customers. Secondly, you need to understand what drives them to progress through the journey. Once you know these motivations, you can align them to each stage in the journey and to touch points your customers will encounter in each stage. This will help to guide messaging across platforms and throughout marketing campaigns, providing a more coherent and consistent customer experience.
Customer journey map are very important, and every company need one, even more if the company is a service one. The first step in order to create a proper customer journey map is to
define which are your customers. This is important because the journey each of your customers
take would not be the same, ultimately because their motivations for completing the journey will be different. This means you need to create personas.19 When you have done this, you should build different customer journey maps for each persona. Once you have your own personas, you need to list every touch point at which you communicate with your customers, from their first step of the experience to the last one.
The most diffused model in the field take into consideration five main steps (Figure 5): 1. Awareness
It concerns the customer's awareness of being able to satisfy their needs with a specific product. The customer can have information about company product or service in a variety of ways, from television or radio advertisement to word-of-mouth, etc. Some of
19 The personas are invented figures that represent the different types of users of a given company. The creation of fictitious clients allows the company to approach the mindset of its real customers, a process that facilitates the identification and therefore the understanding of the objectives, desires, needs and demands of the different categories of consumers. However, it is not simply a matter of devising a stereotype and verifying its compatibility with the proposed product or service. The person must be an archetype. It is therefore necessary to deepen his knowledge, to make his description very detailed and specific, to give it life also outside of his role as a consumer.
these touch points are owned and controlled by the brand, some other not. Some touch points are physical, some are digital, and some other are related to other person.
2. Consideration
This is the phase in which the consumer orients himself towards a product or a service, looks for information on intrinsic and extrinsic characteristics and eventually compares them with other products or services, as well as comparing the price. Generally. In this phase there are more digital touch points, like company’s web site, but in some case, customer consider the product or the service through other kind of channels.
3. Purchase
This is the phase that is completed with the purchase of a product or a service. Generally, in this phase were prevalent physical/human touch points, like the company store, or company agent, but, nowadays, there is an increase of digital touch points, like e-commerce store, mobile app, etc.
4. Retention
This is the phase in which the company actuate all the policies to do not lost customers, supporting and engaging them. Touch points like forum, blogs, FAQ pages, social network, etc. belong to this phase.
5. Loyalty
At a certain point, the customer is not only satisfied by the product or service but is delighted to the point in which he/she became an ambassador of your brand. Here, the company need to reinforce their feeling with promotions and other kind of loyalty programs.
Figure 5 – Customer Journey20
20 Readapted from:
At this point, having a complete vision of the touch points a customer will encounter in each step of the journey, it’s time to address the pain points your personas face from the beginning to the conversion event. In this step, you need to build a framework of the key decisions each personas has to make throughout their customer journey. For each decision stage, you need to define and monitor key goals to help the customer in order to progress him/her to the next stage. Customer Journey Mapping have many benefits for the company. Firstly, it gets a complete overview of where and when customers are interacting with your business. Second, it creates focused messaging aimed at fulfilling the motivations of each persona at each stage in the journey. Third, it helps to build campaigns that have a clearly defined purpose, call to action and KPI for each stage of the journey. Fourth, it shows where the company are currently lacking content that helps customer progress through the journey. Fifth, it identifies choke points and places where the company are currently losing customers. Moreover, it helps to understand where the company need to invest to get a continued flow of people from beginning to end of your journey.21 Thus, there are clear benefits of customer journey mapping for the airline
company and its customers. Using this approach airline companies can identify data hand-off points for a better understanding of the role that each department plays in the overall customer strategy. Used well, it can reveal opportunities to improve the travel experience, acting as a strategic tool to ensure positive interaction with the customer. Understanding which touchpoints are most important to the personas that are critical to airline’s success provides insights into where your company should or should not invest to improve the customer experience.
As we have seen above, before beginning the process of customer journey mapping, it is important to identify the personas. In the airline industry if you try to be all things to all people, you will rarely end up fully satisfying anyone. That is why it is important to focus on understanding your customers by persona and serving each persona’s specific needs. It is possible that an airline will identify numerous personas, but the excessive granularity can cause airlines to miss types of customers who do not fit the kind represented by personas. For the purpose of this chapter, we can identify four main types of personas (Figure 6):
1. Business Travelers
This kind of personas usually have a company travel policy that dictates the airline on which he/she can travel and the fare he/she can book. Therefore, the focus of attention for this persona is more likely on easiness of check-in procedure, transfer service and in-flight Wi-Fi service;
2. Leisure Travelers
This kind of personas place more emphasis on the planning phase, they spend time to search, book activities and additional services, like car rent, or ask to a travel agent to do it. Whatever is they aim for their travel (relax, adventure, city tour, etc.) they typically seek for advices and other suggestions that empower their experience;
3. Group or Family Travelers
This kind of personas have mostly the same similar needs of leisure travelers, but have more expectations on in-flight experience also seeking for a stress-free check.in process;
4. Special Needs Travelers
Special needs customers, 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.
Figure 6 – Travel Personas22
Figure 7 – Air Travel Journey23
22 Readapted from: J. Dent (2013) Customer Journey Mapping: A Walk In Customers’ Shoes, Ascend: A Magazine for Airline Executive, No. 2, pp. 52-56
23 Readapted from: J. Dent (2013) Customer Journey Mapping: A Walk In Customers’ Shoes, Ascend: A Magazine for Airline Executive, No. 2, pp. 52-56.
After the definition of the personas, the next task is to identify the steps in the air travel journey from the perspective of the different personas. There are many steps in an air travel journey and even more touch points, but generally it involves eight main steps (Figure 7):
1. Inspiration
This is the phase in which the traveler starts to think to him/her possible next trip, searching for information about the place, activities, events, etc. In this phase usually customers use digital devices, but also wom is a powerful source of inspiration;
2. Planning
When the traveler has an idea in which place to go, he/she starts to plan the trip comparing prices and fares, searching for special offers, etc. Sometimes one can ‘out search’ this phase preferring to contact a travel agent;
3. Booking
In this phase he/she book the journey through one of the main predisposed channels;
4. Purchase
In this phase, he/she actually pays for the travel. The purchase is separated from the booking phase, because it includes the acquisition of all the products and services other than the flight ticket itself, like seat selection, extra baggage, car rent, etc.
5. Pre-trip
In this phase, the traveler prepares himself/herself to the travel, preparing the luggage and checking if everything is correct and ready;
6. Departure
This phase start when the traveler leaves the place in which he/she stay before the departure and it ends when he/she get on the airplane. It is a very important phase, because it includes many touch points and sub phases (check-in, ground service operations);
7. In-flight
This is the core phase of every air travel journey and the one in which most of all the travelers pay attention. It includes all the in-flight service touch points (crew, catering, etc.) influencing most of all the perceptions of the brand;
8. Post-trip
This the final phase of air travel journey in which the traveler draw conclusions of is entire experience with the company, starting to think about what thinks work and what is not. At the end of this phase, the traveler will choose to leave the relationship with the company or to reengage it in the future.
Merging the list of airline company’s touchpoints and the air travel journey, we can create a sort of sum-up schema, which ultimately represent the Customer Journey Mapping for an air travel customer. Figure 8 below represent this Customer Journey Mapping. As it can be seen the Journey start with the awareness and consideration phases, in which the customer gets inspired to travel somewhere in the world. He/she start to search for him/her best solution, comparing service offer as well as pricing, and ultimately choosing the best one or the one that satisfies him/her at most. Subsequently, the customer decides to purchase the service, no matter which way he/she use, and start to prepare, and organized the journey. In the third and fourth phases, actually he/she enjoy the service payed. Here, is necessary to mention the moment of
truth24. They can be defined as the points in a relationship with a customer, where a business has the opportunity to earn his or her true loyalty by engaging with them. Before enjoying a product or a service, a customer forms an idea in his mind of service he/she will receive. This sort of imaginary service will be compared to the actual one, so that the one that actually he/she receive in reality. Here, the concept of moment of truth indicates all the moments in which a customer evaluates the promises initially done by the company with the actual product or service received. If the product or service maintain and satisfy the expectations the customer will enjoy it, thrusting the company and ultimately increasing the loyalty to the brand, otherwise the process of evaluation decline and the company risk to lose the customer.
Actually, the literature on the moments of truth has evolved in time as the customer journey increase in complexity. The types of moments have expanded to accommodate the modern customer journey, which has rapidly changed through digital customer experiences and smart devices. We can identify up to five different types of moments of truth in the customer journey:25
1. Less Than Zero Moment of Truth (<ZMOT)
It is designed to look at the absolute earliest instance of a potential customer beginning their journey and interacting with a brand. At this moment, something has happened in the life of a customer to become interested in a product or service. In this moment, a company can actively reach out to a customer via social media, email marketing, advertisements and more before the customer even comes to them for more information.
2. Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT)
24 The idea of “moments of truth” began with A.G. Lafley, Chairman, President and CEO of Procter & Gamble, in 2005 and initially outlined two moments.
25 Source: https://www.liferay.com/blog/en-us/customer-experience/what-are-the-five-moments-of-truth-in-marketing-
It concerns the moment when a person begins searching for information regarding a product or service that he or she is interested in. At this time, a customer will encounter reviews and more information about the product before moving forward in the journey. While companies will not be able to control all online reviews, they can positively influence their online reputation through their interactions with the audience and the quality of the product, which will lead to good reviews that can encourage people to continue their journey with the brand.
3. First Moment of Truth (FMOT)
It is centered on when a potential customer encounters your product or service for the first time. Commonly, it only lasts for a few seconds and can include the customer reading a description or hearing a pitch from a representative in order to better understand how the product may serve his or her needs.
4. Second Moment of Truth (SMOT)
After first seeing the product, the audience will move on to the Second Moment of Truth. Here, the customer truly experiences what your company is offering. This can occur before purchasing the product, such as experiencing a hands-on demonstration of a new phone, but may also happen after a purchase, which occurs frequently in the modern age of online shopping where a customer does not truly experience the product until after it arrives. While a SMOT that occurs before purchase will have a greater influence on whether a customer will pay for a service or product, a SMOT that happens afterward will still have a major impact on their satisfaction and continuing relationship with a brand, which can affect reputation and audience reach.
5. Ultimate Moment of Truth (UMOT)
It is centered on feedback from customers concerning the product. The product’s ability to fulfill the needs of the customer, as well as the company’s efforts to provide an enjoyable experience along the way to purchasing it, will shape the audience’s emotional response to what they have received. During the UMOT, a customer may choose to share their opinions on the service with the company that provided it, write a review online and give their opinions to family, friends and colleagues. These takeaways will influence whether they become a re-engaged customer and it is known as the Ultimate Moment because it may become the ZMOT for other people.
The third and fourth phases will then represent the SMOT for our air customer traveler. In fact, he or she arrive at the airport encountering the check crew, using fast track entrance service or staying in the company lounge before the departure, etc.
Figure 8 – Customer Journey Mapping26
Subsequently, he or she will get on the airplane encountering in-flight crew, enjoying the airplane configuration and dressing, tasting the dishes proposed by the company, etc. Every single point that represent a piece of the overall service proposed by the company is subject to a voluntary or involuntary evaluation by the customer, who will be satisfied or not by him/her purchasing. Now we are entering in the post-flight phase which starts when the customer leaves the airplane entering in the arrival airport. Here, the customer actually evaluates him/her experience. The results of the evaluation frequently are shared with other customer both online, writing a review for example, and off-line, sharing him/her opinion to family and friends or unknown people.
The air travel customer journey ended and on the bases of the work done, the company will have a satisfied the customer, acquired him/her loyalty, and convince him/her to re-engage the journey for a next air travel.
But going beyond to the single journey, the most relevant think that emerge from the above discourse is the importance of the customer journey mapping as a powerful tool to design, analyze, and monitor the interactions with the customers. It enables the airline to determine what it is doing well, where there is a need of improvements and where to invest in solutions to enhance the customer experience, increase revenue and grow brand loyalty.
26 Readapted from J. Dent (2013) Customer Journey Mapping: A Walk In Customers’ Shoes, Ascend: A Magazine for Airline Executive, No. 2, pp. 52-56.
Despite the importance of customer journey mapping, the challenges for an airline company do not ends here. In particular, most of these challenges depend on the fact that the airline transportation industry is a very complex business. It faces a combination of specific evidence that rarely occur in the same time. An airline business company generally: employ large and geographically dispersed workforces (often highly unionized) with seniority pay scales; have an asset intensive operation; use virtual networks that include international alliances, domestic code-share and regional partnerships; obliged to follow continue safety threats and heavy governmental regulations (e.g., taxes, seat size). All these complexities further complicate efforts to deliver a consistently engaging customer experience. More than this, newcomers, low-cost companies, or alternative way of travelling could disrupt traditional airline business models.
For the above reasons, it is important for an airline company align what they are actually offering or what they want to deliver in the future, to what the customer segment expect and desire. According to Deloitte (2016), every brand, at every level, has the opportunity to deliver an effective and revenue-enhancing Customer Experience. The measure of that is not how much they spend, but how well the Customer Experience aligns with the brand vision and corporate strategy. Figure 9 below offers a schema of organization strategy regarding Customer Experience on the bases of two parameter: degree of differentiation and organizational support for a change. The former parameter measures the degree to which a product or a service specifically address the customer needs, the latter measures the degree to which an organization is prepared for a customer experience transformation strategy. In the upper side of spectrum, there are “visionary” organizations, which sense future customer needs and embed customer experience in their culture. At the opposite side of the spectrum, there are “agnostic” organizations, which focus on operational performances reducing costs. In the middle, “responsive” organizations, know the need to identify and address customer pain points and set up some formal customer experience governance. One-step higher, “optimized” organizations have a structured customer experience strategy and not just address customer pain points but work to anticipate them in order to create better experiences for target customer segments. At every place on this spectrum, there are companies in travel sector that have staked out an effective brand identity that can provide differentiation from their competition. There is no right or wrong customer experience strategy in absolute term, so that it cannot be said that a company is failing in providing the best customer experience. What matter here is that the customer experience that the airline will provide is the one that the company have determined to be the best to meet organization’s needs and customers’ values. In any case, it is important that what
the company promise to customers is what that the company really offer to them. It can be detrimental to promise an experience on one end of the customer experience spectrum and then to deliver a lesser experience, either operationally or emotionally.
Figure 9 – Customer Experience Spectrum27
Customer satisfaction is generally up among airlines, but, on average, it remains very low,28 thus creating potential opportunities for customer experience investment. Many airlines have made investments in recent years to improve customer experience; however, there is still a significant opportunity for customer experience improvements within the airline industry. These opportunities vary in terms of profitability, word of mouth advantages, and brand loyalty. In fact, companies that make the customer experience a priority at executive and managerial level have the opportunity to increase the return on sales about twelve times than those companies with a low emphasis on customer experience. Additionally, it is estimated that a moderate increase in Customer Experience generates an average revenue increase of $823 million over three years for a company with $1 billion in annual revenues. Relatedly, an increase in retention by 5% can increase profits by 25% up to 95%.29
27 Readapted from: A. Reichheld, D. McGlone, J. Samotny, and S. Perrone Goldstein (2016) Through passengers’
eyes. Delivering the “right” customer experience, Deloitte, pp. 1-10.
28 Even if the airline industry get a score of 75 over 100 points, it is still ranks 33th over 43 industries in customer satisfaction, which puts the industry amongst the likes of telephone service providers and health insurance companies (Source: ACSI Travel Report 2017 American Customer Satisfaction Index, ACSI LLC, pp. 1-13).
29 Source: Help Scout (2012) 75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics. How Your Business Can Deliver
Moreover, positive word of mouth can drive up to $56 million of additional revenue per year for a large airline. This happen because customers tend to mention a good brand experience to an average of nine people but will talk about a bad one to sixteen people.30 But, if we think to today communication this number will increase more and more through online sharing information. Social media have enabled and enforced word of mouth to spread faster than ever, so the customer experience you provide to one person, may be heard by others in real-time.31 Ultimately, it is important to consider that it is five to twenty-five times more expensive to acquire a new customer than it is to keep a current one,32 and it is rather important that customers who experience positive customer experience will likely remain customers for five years longer than customers with negative experiences will.33
All these quantitative facts reinforce the importance of the customer experience in today business activity. As we have seen above, effective customer experience begins with charting the company’s ambition. That will affect in where and how to invest in developing the customer experience strategy. In fact, after having defined the company’s customer experience ambition, it is important to program the required investment in terms of planning, analysis, and execution. Moving to a more enhancing customer experience strategy involve investments in various subjects such as organizational cultural change, data management, and marketing/brand concept. No matter if a company will draw the resources from inside the company or will buy them from outside, what matter most is that all these areas need to converge, or better, must have as final aim of creating, analysis, monitoring and improving the experience for target customers.
In this regard, it is important to notice that although airlines collect an incredible amount of passenger data, this has not helped the industry’s customer service scores which, as we have seen, is notorious mediocre.34 Relatedly, airline customers still suffer many pain points when travelling with an airline company. Some are not directly related to airline companies, such as waiting for deeply and ever-accurate boarding security procedure. While some other are, such as waiting in never ending queue for baggage check-in, or setting on shrinking seats, or obliged to stay on the ground and not flying at all because of overbooking. The list could be very long. Nevertheless, things are slowly changing. What emerge from the Aviation Festival Americas
30 Source: Help Scout (2012) 75 Customer Service Facts, Quotes & Statistics. How Your Business Can Deliver
With the Best of the Best, pp. 1-82.
31 Source: Forrester Report (2018) The Business Impact of Investing in Experience, Forrester, pp. 1-14. 32 Source: A. Gallo (2014) Value of Keeping the Right Customers, HBR
33 Source: P. Kriss (2014) Value of Customer Experience, Quantified, HBR.
2018 in Miami is that the newest and biggest airline innovation starts with “the traveler”.35 Passenger safety will always be the first goal and priority for airlines companies, but next major opportunity for differentiation in the marketplace is to focus on the customer experience and how to better serve the traveler.
The first thing that emerge is a better messaging and communication strategy. Starting from the use of platform like WhatsApp or Telegram to provide flight change to customers that rely on application, moving to bi-directional conversation with passengers, using for example Facebook messenger. This kind of communication, besides increasing customer satisfaction and reduce customer efforts, it is important to increase and safeguard company’s brand reputation creating more customer intimacy and giving to customer service representative the opportunity to provide personalized care to travelers and to address quickly customer issues. Linked to the messaging strategy, what emerge from multiple sources is the increasing use of Chatbot in websites or apps. They have the aim of answer to frequently asked questions (FAQs) helping customers to find information they need and giving the opportunity to customer care representative to focus on those problem that are singular, or that happen occasionally, providing a more value-added service to travelers. One beautiful example of this is Air New Zealand Chatbot named Bravo Oscar Tango. This Chatbot answers to commonly asked questions by customers, but in true AI fashion, Oscar’s conversations will become more natural and helpful the more he interacts with customers. Currently, Oscar can help with the Air New Zealand Lounge, Air-points, and baggage questions. However, the airline hopes eventually including him in the Air New Zealand Mobile app for voice and chat. The end-goal is to have Oscar recognize passengers and guide them through every step of the customer journey, from booking to finding a taxi to the airport.36 From this example, it can be noticed a more general truth: Airlines Companies have slowly recognized that the flight itself is only a part of the travel journey and it only solves a portion of traveler needs. Thus, more and more airline companies have, or have try to, construct a platform that can provide a complete solution in terms of mobility, flight and home/hotel booking. A recent example of this is the United Airlines partnership with Uber, but today mostly every airline company have partnership with hotel site and renting car companies.
The second things that emerge is the intensive use of technology to eliminate common customer pain points such as such as flight delays, lost or delayed luggage, and slow boarding procedures.
35 Source: https://www.sparkcentral.com/blog/aviation-festival-airline-innovation/
36 Source: https://w3.accelya.com/blog/redefining-airline-customer-experience-5-examples-to-inspire-your-brand
For instance, Air France was one of the first to begin using baggage-tracking technology, which now helps many airlines avoid luggage issues.37 To speed up ticketing and boarding, JetBlue and now many others have completely automated the check-in process.38 While flight delays may seemingly be uncontrollable at times, airlines are finding ways to limit them. Virgin Atlantic is perhaps the best example of this. The airline is using the Internet of Things to connect every piece of its Boeing 787 aircraft. By collecting data about the plane’s condition in real time, Virgin Atlantic can perform preventive maintenance more effectively which reduces delays from mechanical issues.39 Relatedly, Southwest Airlines has a partnership with NASA since many years, to be warned of any safety concerns and maintain air safety. NASA along with machine learning algorithms has an automated system, which analyses huge volumes of data and finds out inconsistencies leading to any accidents.40 On another side, airlines start to
explore other types of technologies such as virtual reality and blockchain. In 2015, Australian airline Qantas became the first to offer VR headsets on flights. This enabled the airline to offer passengers a unique in-flight experience in the meanwhile collecting and analyzing the data generated by the customers in order to extract insights.41 In the end of 2017, some interest cases regarding blockchain was revealed to the public: Lufthansa announced a partnership to explore blockchain-based distribution; Air New Zealand revealed that it is exploring blockchain for baggage, retail, distribution and loyalty use cases.42
The third thing that emerge is related to the increasingly use of big data both for personal level engagement with customers and other kind of innovative services. The arrival of big data has put airlines in a better position than ever to know their customers. By tracking customer behavior and purchase history, airlines can better know what each traveler wants. This will make it easier to engage with customers in the way they want. With social media, apps, and more, airlines can even directly engage with customers. They can do things like host contests, rate top destinations, swap stories, and more. For example, Ryanair, with the ‘Rate My Flight’ feature, is working to improve its services by simply asking the customer what they can do better. This allows the low-cost carrier the chance to get to know each customer individually
37 Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/23/business/chip-technology-keeps-checked-luggage-in-check.html?_r=0 38 Source: https://www.cio.com/article/2915233/innovation/how-jetblue-uses-tech-to-help-customers-take-flight.html 39 Source: https://w3.accelya.com/blog/the-airline-customer-experience-5-predictions-for-2017 40 Source: https://www.promptcloud.com/blog/five-interesting-use-cases-of-big-data-analytics-in-airline-industry/ 41 Source: https://www.cnbc.com/2016/07/13/virtual-reality-and-netflix-the-future-of-in-flight-entertainment-is-coming.html 42 Source: https://www.futuretravelexperience.com/2018/01/10-technology-trends-airlines-airports-2018/
and reach out if there is a major problem.43 In this regard, recently United Airlines, made a switch from the age old “collect and analyze” method to a “collect, detect, act” approach. This system analyses around many variables in each customer’s profile that are analyzed in few seconds in order to present custom-made offers to customers. This approach has shot up United Airlines’ annual revenue by 15%.44 However, the infinite application of big data analysis don’t
end up with personalization, but continues with: performance benchmarking, competitive analytics, and predictive analytics; real-time analytics to optimize flight schedule, fleet management and crew allocation; pricing, revenue management, forecasting, and risk analysis; adherence to regulatory compliance; in-flight service and food supply forecasting; air safety and airplane maintenance; fuel efficiency optimization; etc. The application of data and analytics in revenue management is aimed at defining how to sell a product to those who need it, at a reasonable cost at the right time and using the right channel.45 Big data and machine
learning are used to determine demanded flights routes, willingness to pay of customers, expected marginal seat revenue, and ancillary price optimization. Another interest application is related to crew management. Schedule for pilots and flight attendants is a very complex task due to many legal constraints and other factors (such as flight route, crewmember licensing and qualification, aircraft type and fuel usage, work regulations, vacations and days off). However, in this case, algorithms do not perform alone like the one for airplane maintenance and feedback analysis, but they are supervised and integrated with operation management systems. Big data and machine learning also helps a lot supply management to calculate and forecast the numbers of snack, meals, and drinks that must be on boarded without being wasted.46 There are interested cases of big data/machine learning/AI applications in airline industry that provide value added for both the airline company and its customers. For example, Delta Airlines implement AI to optimize operations and costs, as well as customer service at every stage of the journey. In 2016, the airline has implemented radio frequency identification (RFID) baggage tracking technology47 and one year later they have presented four self-service baggage checking machine installed in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. One kiosk was equipped to try facial recognition technology to confirm a traveler’s identity by matching their faces with passport
43 Source: http://fortune.com/2014/06/19/big-data-airline-industry/
44 Source: https://medium.com/@exastax/how-airlines-are-using-big-data-6bf47bb27d90
45 It’s based on the idea that customers perceive product value differently, so the price they are ready to pay for it depends on target groups they belong to and purchase time
46 Source: https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/datascience/7-ways-how-airlines-use-artificial-intelligence-and-data-science-to-improve-their-operations/
47 Source: https://www.altexsoft.com/blog/business/digital-transformation-stories-how-ups-amazon-jdcom-delta-and-maersk-change-transportation-and-logistics-industry/
photos. Another interesting example is EasyJet, which has been using AI to determine how many food and drinks, is enough to feed passengers on a single flight. The demand for snacks and meals depend on attributes such as weather, types of passengers expected to be on board, and the time of the year. This company use data science also to improve its pricing strategy and manage inventory. This approach allowed EasyJet to increase profits per seat almost 20 percent between 2010 and 2014. The carrier also planned to analyze more than 1.3 billion searches on its site every year to determine optimal routes and flight times. The last example refers to the best airline company in term of customer satisfaction in 2018,48 Southwest Airline. In August 2013, they announced the intention to implement a suite of customer contact and workforce optimization. The software suite includes six products that facilitate the interaction between contact center agents and travelers as well as optimize employee workflow. Moreover, Southwest understand that listening to what your customers say and improving operations based on their suggestions are fundamental steps to achieving high-level customer service. They, indeed, implement its Listening Center, which consist in forty experts from Customer Relations, Marketing, and Communication departments that monitor and analyze through machine learning social media feeds to allow the airline to solve emerging issues as rapidly as possible.49
Figure 10 – Airline Industry Trends
48 Source: https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-news/southwest-airlines-best-customer-experience 49 Source:
