What is customer experience?
For the last couple of years, I’ve been troubled by the fact that, the meaning of customer experience management is too dispersed among the aviation industry. That’s why it has been hard for a substantial fraction of the airlines to position it within their current framework. Because they are focusing on the wrong questions like “what?” and “how?” while the first question to answer should be “why?"
Customer experience is many things and it can have different meanings. What it is and what it means is formed by the answer to the question “why?”
Airline management should focus on the purposes like increasing customer retention, increasing loyalty, smoothly managing irregular operations, and improving merchandising and so on. Each of these answers leads to a series of applications about how to accomplish that purpose and what to do. The collection, unification, and analysis of these applications, is the customer experience management for that airline.
So, how does an airline get there? Building a team to run the whole customer experience management operation is essential. Restructuring for customer orientation should start with collaboration, the inclusion of the existing staff and their ideas. Airlines should create a team consisting of people from various departments to represent the whole travel journey of the guests. The airline strategy and purpose should be collective.
For the applications designed to serve that purpose to work, these people must be well informed. The reason for that application, the relevant information about the customer, relevant information regarding the operation should be ready for a smooth execution.
Therefore, the team created should start with creating stories, brainstorming and thinking of ways to improve the experience of the customer for each story. The applications can be designed, the information required can be determined, the budget required can be calculated and the operation can be set up after that. When the requirements are ready, either finding a product to serve those requirements or implementing each application on existing products is the easy part.