By Lauren Kayser, from the Loyalty department at Ipsos MORI
Having worked on numerous research studies in the travel sector over recent years, I’ve seen how travel companies strive for the heights of flawless and memorable customer experiences. I have also come to recognise where they might fall short of these.
Hotels, airlines and travel agencies in particular aim to ‘know’ their customers through the use of sophisticated CRM programmes supported by Big Data capabilities to deliver personalised experiences.Where not supported by an evolved CEM culture these smart systems can miss the mark and lack the human touch.
These of course have the potential to work well. We can’t deny how impressive it is when cabin crew, booking websites or hotel staff, armed with rich individual data, wow customers by remembering intricate details of their personal needs and behaviour. Examples might include knowing a customer’s favourite type of wine, whether they prefer a pet friendly hotel and even the precise recorded time they are likely to be back in their hotel room after a long business meeting and might be delighted to discover a bubble bath is awaiting them at the perfect temperature.
But collecting massive amounts of data and assessing its relevance in order to best meet customers’ needs certainly comes with challenges.
I’ve witnessed on many occasions travel customers venting their irritation about flaws in these systems. Gripes such as “I got an email from them asking if I fancied a trip to explore the delights of Barcelona when I’d literally just returned from Barcelona – a holiday I booked via their website – surely they should have known this! ”In such instances clearly more work needs to be done to ensure communications are timely and relevant.
And what about when the software does work perfectly – is this enough? Are platforms and sophisticated databases sufficient enough in the travel sector to demonstrate they know their customers?
Some airlines and hotels are undoubtedly leading the way when it comes to capturing customer preferences and personal details on platforms such as tablets and wearables. But these expensive systems can quickly become a wasted resource if the members of staff delivering the ‘personal touch’ lack people skills and the ability to create a genuine connection.
A friend recently travelled on an international airline and was pleasantly surprised when welcomed on board by an air stewardess who approached him with a tablet, greeted him by his name and wished him an enjoyable flight. However, this pleasantry was soon dampened when he realised this staff member was working her way around the flight deck, doing the same to other passengers and barely even looking up from her screen in the process. It quickly became evident that this pleasantry was far from genuine and was in fact more of a box-ticking exercise.
An interviewee also recently shared how awkward he felt when the crew wished him happy birthday on-board a flight, singling him out with a loud applause for the rest of the cabin to hear. Being a modest gentleman who also happened to be a little aggravated at having to travel for work on that particular day, the last thing he wanted was to be reminded that he was away from his family and travelling solo on his birthday. If done more subtly or for someone more appreciative of the attention this might have worked. But in his mind, the crew had not tuned into the fact that he just wanted to get on with his work and wait to celebrate with loved ones – not a plane full of strangers.
So there is inevitably also a danger here when personal customer information is correctly captured within a system but staff armed with this information fails to tune into customer needs and emotions. Thankfully, more and more of our travel clients at Ipsos are recognising this issue and are supporting their staff in not just ‘knowing’ more information about customers, but most critically – in terms of how to act on this information – really ‘getting to know’ them and recognising their emotional state. Investing in rich customer insight and journey mapping engagements helps staff appreciate the fact that people have different personalities, different needs and might feel differently depending on their travel situation. This human touch is essential to delivering the CRM vision and proving to travel customers how much a company really cares.
Interesting links:
- We are not obliged to offer cheapest tickets, says First Great Western email
- Flipkart wants to build brain like capabilities using big data to understand customer needs
- BBC Travel’s 2015 Travel Pioneers
OUR CONTRIBUTOR
Lauren Kayser
from the Loyalty department at Ipsos MORI
Lauren works in the Loyalty department at Ipsos MORI where she specialises in customer and employee experience work and has a strong qualitative research background. The projects she works on involve journey mapping, stakeholder and employee engagement and business activation, often in the travel sector. She regularly travels for both business and leisure purposes and is passionate about anything travel related.