Customer Data As Asset

Increase Your Revenue Through Customized Service Offerings

The more you know about your customers, the better you can serve them. Collecting customer data not only allows you to create additional revenue for your company, but also helps you increase the amount of positive word-of-mouth. This even applies to irregularities. Customized offers based on past behavioral patterns can influence individual perceptions of such irregularities in the interest of your business while reducing negative word-of-mouth. Most marketing literature presents similar approaches to collect customer data: loyalty programs, payment cards, surveys, and storing additional data, such as browser data and online purchase behavior. However, we emphasize that in an offline service context, your employees are your best source for gathering additional customer data.

Ensure Your Employees Gather Customer Data

In an offline setting, customer data, such as browser information, cannot be collected. Thus, ensure that your employees gather additional relevant customer data for you – train employees to be attentive and to listen to customers. In conversations with employees during service delivery, customers often reveal particular insights that cannot be collected through loyalty programs, payment cards, or surveys, but only through personal interactions. Ensure that your IT systems allow for this additional data-collection method and that employees are trained sufficiently in how to enter such data from customer conversations and observations into your system.

Be More Time-Efficient – Track Your Customers

Locating your customers along the customer journey in real time will allow you to offer more personalized services. In an aviation setting, find out how soon passengers arrive at the airport before their flights, which fares they have booked, whether they line up at the staffed check-in desks or prefer the self-service drop-off counters, which airlines they fly on, whether they go to the lounge or shop at the duty-free store, etc. Once passengers have dropped off their luggage, you might want to send a personalized offer for discounted lounge access, along with the baggage receipt. Or when fliers buy duty-free items, you might want to send them more information about pre-ordering opportunities for their next flight. The closer you track your customers, the more customized your offers can be.

Airlines And Airports Must Work Better Together

Airports and airlines, as industry stakeholders, share not only the same goals – such as profit maximization, customer satisfaction, and continuous growth – but also the same customers. Except for suppliers, airport visitors, and passengers’ friends and relatives, people in airports are airport customers just as they are airline customers. This means that airports and airlines have similar goals and should work better together, especially in terms of customer data collection and data sharing. One negative experience at the airport or on a flight influences the perception of the customer’s entire journey. If service at the airport falls short, it is harder for the airline to achieve customer satisfaction, and vice versa. Thus, both stakeholders need to integrate their services to a much larger extent in the interest of overall customer satisfaction.

Turning Irregularities Into Opportunities

When a flight gets delayed, you can use your customer data to turn such an irregularity into an additional revenue opportunity, for instance, by sending passengers customized offers to influence their subjective perceptions of the delay. If a passenger has an airline credit card and always drinks coffee at one specific café at the airport, why not send him or her an invitation for a free drink at this specific café if a flight gets delayed? Or if a passenger bought lounge access prior to his or her last flight, but not for the current one, if this flight is delayed, you can provide perks to assuage the customer’s frustration, e.g., offering lounge access at a discounted price. In this way, you can generate additional revenue during irregularities and even increase customer satisfaction because passengers will feel like you handled the irregularity well.