The Road to Complete Personalization: How Airlines Can Navigate the Disruption Curve
Personalization has come of age. Personalized experiences are necessary to win the hearts and wallets of today’s travelers and, after years of hype and promise, airlines are finally rushing to truly personalize their interactions with their customers. Maturing technologies and converging channels are making personalization possible and even mandatory. However, Mindtree’s Winning in the Age of Personalization research, which surveyed over 3,000 travelers on how they explore, engage, purchase, and advocate a product or service, revealed that travel companies haven’t fully mastered the art of identifying the customer needs and wants accurately and are inundating them with competing offers across channels.
Most airlines have started to figure out personalize customer interactions with broader customer micro-segments across multiple touch points. Typically, personalization at micro-segment level begins with descriptive attributes such as contact and demographic information and stated preferences. However, few have looked at the much more granular 1:1 personalization, which leverages analytical insights to make it easier for travelers to find what they want, how and when they want it.
Bridge the Gap with Enriched 360-degree Customer View and Contextual Insights
The road to complete personalization starts with a unified and enriched 360-degree view of the customer. This includes customer profiles, demographic information travel needs and preferences, purchase data - including ancillaries, social, behavioral data including loyalty, contribution to profit and margins and the overall customer lifetime value. A full and accurate view would also source data such as total revenue, contribution to margin, ancillary purchase history and loyalty-program information. When this enriched 360-degree customer view is infused with contextual insights - such as location, traveling alone or with family, and other live customer intelligence leads into a fine grained just-in-time customer persona or traveler genome for a hyper 1:1 personal engagement across multiple touchpoints. Without these, the descriptive segment level personalization might just as well belong to any other airline.
Airlines have started to realize that the root of personalization is in understanding the travel offerings and products from traveler’s perspective. That means, airlines have to start mapping the product genome in a similar fashion how the customer genome is built before personalization algorithms and engines can start making informed decisions to match the customer genome with the product genome. With this approach, airlines can deliver hyper relevant offers and recommendations, personalized messages across all customer touch-points using context-weighted personalization algorithms.
Airlines must own their customers’ big data and interpret it to successfully deliver a more contextual experience for travelers. Service personalization and efficient operation depends on the availability of data for analysis. Real-time analytics allows airlines to react to real-time events such as IRROPS, missed connections or lost baggage.
Incorporate Customer Feedback with AI and Machine Learning
Few airlines have figured out how to predict individual customers’ responses to personalized price discounts and other promotional offers. The key to this is to incorporate and loop customer’s feedback into the optimization algorithms. AI and Cognitive machine learning algorithms can be deployed to continuously learn from customers’ direct and indirect feedback and enhance predictive models and optimization algorithms to deliver a better curated personalized experience to each individual passenger.
Automation is a Good Thing… When Used Wisely
Assisted selling bots can reduce the number of searches a passenger has to make to get to his or her choice of ticket. And for corporate travelers, chatbots can drive more relevant, policy-compliant bookings as the bots have access to travel history, as well the corporate policies. Chatbots can look at a passenger record and determine that the passenger always flies business class, travels with kids, or prefers more leg room. It can also then incorporate a customer’s location and other contextual attributes to deliver a next best action or offer. For instance, a chatbot can engage a traveler by an iBeacon encounter at the airport and offer choices for traveler’s food and beverage needs.
Human Interaction is Vital to Personalization and Overall Customer Satisfaction
Mindtree’s personalization research also reveals that customers are willing to pay more for better customer service. 78 percent of respondents in the survey reported that they made an online purchase based on personalized promotions on relevant products or services they have not purchased before.
While automation and bots are great and necessary, airlines must use them to enhance the travel experience and not as a substitute. A select few airlines don’t underestimate the value of human interaction, and they provide customers the ability to move seamlessly between digital channels and human interactions. As passengers expect same level of personalization when they come in contact with the airline staff, airlines must deliver personalized insights to their staff through customer persona and insights dashboards in the form of mobile or desktop apps.
Personalization is not inundating customers with too many offers and messages. It is an empathy-led, process-driven and knowledge-intensive discipline. Airlines that provide highly personalized customer experience at various touch-points in the customer journey make a difference and get rewarded with higher NPS.
In summary, the road to complete personalization goes through the below signs:
- Make use of real-time big data and analytics to achieve full consumer understanding
- Anticipate customers’ needs, rather than react to them
- Move from messages to ongoing conversations to better serve customers
- Deliver a consistent, compelling customer experience across all touch points & channels
- Expand 1:1 relationship management by balancing digital exuberance with a human touch
Srinivas Kasthoori - Associate Vice President of Travel, Transportation and Hospitality Industry Group at Mindtree
