The Low Cost Carer

In my, and I suspect, many peoples experience we don’t usually associate a Low Cost Carrier or Budget Airline as one who pays a particular amount of attention to end-to-end customer experience. I see two main areas of their focus;

1.      Marketing to make the sale

LCC’s typically have great marketing campaigns, decent websites or apps, and a perception of great value. This is the marketing that drives the sale. It’s seems to be highly personalized, as you are able to go from buying a seat (or booking a place), actually buying the seat you want, the amount of luggage you intend to take, your meal, insurance, car hire, an hotel, a wine cooler, a new kitchen, a burial plot and anything else that they believe they can throw at you. Which leads us nicely to the second element…

2.      Maximizing the revenue opportunity

There is no issue with that, it’s just not very personal. Selling as many add-on’s as they can with often highly restrictive conditions (booking changes and cancellations, if any). Again, no issue with that because that’s what makes them an LCC, that’s the business model.

Of course, this is coupled with an aggressive and relentless mission to drive down costs to ensure that the $10 seat they sold you, returns some profits.

It was very refreshing therefore, to attend a presentation by, and talk to, some folks from an American LCC that actually do value the customer experience and are making it their mission to invest in the guest and to seek continuous guest experience improvement, throughout the guest journey and encompassing their products, processes, staff and their network.

All the expected touch-points are covered from on-time performance, to customers self-service, mobile apps, chat services and loyalty. You would expect these from an airline (if not the average LCC). But these guys have gone even further to look at seat redesign in order to improve passenger comfort. Not, what you would expect from an LCC.

They have focused on the moments that matter – the booking process, the experience at the airports and of course on-board the aircraft and have used their operational data and experience data to help define these moments and focus the attention.

The operational data is readily available – passenger booking details, flight details and aircraft details – and then introduced Experience Management solutions to measure the guest experience, through surveys (they survey over 80% of passengers), focusing on the major touch-points, to determine a net promoter score and guest satisfaction rating.

Bringing operation and experience date together has enabled them, in near real time, to change their behavior with the guest in mind. The results have spoken for themselves with a significant improvement in Airline Quality Ratings over the past year.

A low-cost carrier that cares? Now that’s the Spirit!