A great customer experience is key to reducing churn, garnering repeat business, and maintaining a strong brand reputation. But how do you measure the quality of your services in a cramped cabin at 30,000 feet?
You start by collecting as much data as you can. Airlines require every flight crew to capture a wide variety of customer service data for each flight:
- Departure times and causes of delays
- Time required to board the aircraft
- The quality of all in-flight meals and catering services
- Whether the cabin and lavatories were properly cleaned prior to take-off
- Whether the in-seat entertainment systems worked properly
- The occurrence of any accidents or passenger injuries
- …and much more
All the collected data is sent back to headquarters, where the information for each flight is reviewed during a daily operations meeting. Executives rate the performance of the service provided by each department, identify any issues, and determine next steps. When collecting this information using antiquated paper-based processes, it typically takes 4-5 days to create a full report. Crews often have to finish the forms at the hotel later in the evening, and fax or scan and email a stack of papers the next morning to office clerks who manually enter the information from all flights into spreadsheets or back-office systems. This slow and error-prone process makes it difficult to gather accurate data and quickly act on emerging issues.
Luckily, there’s a better way.
A North American airline recently decided to transform their entire customer experience evaluation process into a flexible digital workflow, where all data is captured and submitted using iPads running ProntoForms.
Soar with mobility
The easy-to-use ProntoForms mobile app enables rapid and accurate data collection, so crews can quickly fill out entire forms en route. The solution works offline and automatically submits forms to the airline’s back-office system as soon as the crew disembarks at a destination with network connectivity. This means senior management can review submitted data across all service areas and flights in near real time, and react to service issues as they emerge.
The ProntoForms solution is also used to build and configure context-sensitive digital workflows that automatically route relevant data to multiple stakeholders simultaneously. What does this mean? It means the solution slices and dices the data and automatically distributes the right sub-set of information to each recipient. At the North American airline, senior airline operations staff receive full reports, whereas each department manager receives customized reports – the catering team receives catering reports, cleaning teams receive cleaning reports, etc.
With the old paper-based system, all stakeholders received the service report in its entirety. A catering manager would have to sift through dozens of pages just to find the two pages’ worth of catering service data.
Most importantly, the mobile solution allows individual contributors – in-flight crew members – to focus on their jobs. They don’t have to consider who to send the report to. The workflow automatically takes care of all the distribution details.
Identify lagging service areas via Analytics
Collecting data related to the customer experience is important, but it’s just the first step. The true value of the solution lies in the second step – analyzing the data to uncover trends and insights. In our airline example, operations executives review the incoming data in detailed analytics dashboards and reports, making it easy to identify locations, divisions, crews, and subcontractors that offer subpar service. Now armed with the ability to quickly identify and correct lagging service areas, the airline has seen a sizeable uptick in customer satisfaction scores.
ProntoForms is actively working with several other airlines to mobilize their processes for a similar return on investment. Visit our Airline page to learn more about how ProntoForms can take your customer experience to new heights.
Mats Lindeberg, Communications Manager, contributed to this article.
