Do you understand your customers?
How do airlines identify customer needs?
How can loyalty programs use that data to improve customer loyalty?
Understanding your customers is more important now than at any other point in the history of the business.
Customers have a choice of which brands they want to transact with, and if your brand isn’t fulfilling their emotional needs a customer – another brand will!
Many airlines talk the talk on knowing their customers, and some airlines have fantastic products that their customers love. But, does that translate into incremental revenue and improved customer satisfaction?
How can airlines and hotels better understand their customers?
Five key metrics every airline and hotel loyalty program should be focusing on.
1: Share of Wallet
How much of your customer’s spend is your business capturing today
Chances are, your customers also do business with your competitors. It’s essential to know how much your customers are spending with the competition. After all, if your business doesn’t know how much revenue is on the table – how is it possible to measure success?
Traditional metrics like average revenue per user, basket size, frequency of repeat purchase are great for short term tracking. To track long term health of the loyalty proposition, measuring growth and share of wallet/share of spend is the golden metric.
Understanding your customers through share of wallet tracking can be achieved by partnering banks, telcos, start-ups and other third parties.
Airlines are using the share of wallet data to track when passengers fly with competing airlines.
2: Behavioural Insights
Why did your customer make that last reservation?
Both hotels and airlines can benefit from understanding why the customer made the booking. Simply knowing the booking is for leisure travel can be useful for simple actions such as what ancillary options to present to the customer. Consider the leisure traveller has a family with young children and booked a flight ticket.
Showing ancillary upsells to an exit row is a waste of real estate as young children can’t sit in exit rows. Instead, if your airline sells meals onboard – present a ‘meal bundle’ which acknowledges the customer will purchase multiple meals for their family.
Cebu Pacific increased ancillary revenue by AUD $630,000 on pre-return trip emails, by leveraging the Boxever platform.
3: Customer Propensity Scoring
How likely is your customer likely to apply for the co-brand credit card?
