The answer? Personalisation.
Airlines can use personalised messaging to overcome choice paralysis at every stage of their journey:
1) Booking their flight
Personalised ancillary offers tailored to your customers' search history or based on data in the PNR or your CRM system will make sure they're only served offers such as hotels or car hire that are most suited to them.
For example, only offering family-friendly hotel choices and relevant-sized cars to a family travelling with children will improve your customers’ perceptions of the brand as well as conversion rate.
Read how Edelweiss - part of the Lufthansa Group - increased its car bookings by 100% overnight with this approach.
2) During disruption
Airlines need to offer simple self-service to guide customers to their next best action – because when we’re stressed, decision-making becomes more difficult.
Giving customers the option to carry out a simple step via a pre-filled microsite or app during disruption means freeing up calls to your contact centre and avoiding queues at the airport.
Think, “Because you watched X you may enjoy Y” on Netflix and “People who bought X also bought Y” on Amazon
Making it easy to change their flight, reaccommodate or cancel their booking means passengers will remember the ease of your user experience – and be more likely to fly with you again as well as sharing their experience with others.
Microsites with deep links make this journey easy for passengers. Integrated with the PNR, relevant information is automatically inserted so they don’t have to go looking for it.
This leaves them just to accept the re-accommodation option you’ve provided, or to decline so they can find a solution that they prefer.
How it works for Ryanair
Ryanair has been partnering with 15below to manage their disruption communications for more than 20 years.
Over the past 12 months, they have utilised the 15below platform to generate 89 million notifications to their customers. The pandemic has resulted in a high volume of flight cancellations and reschedules, often with very short notice and specific to regulations by country.
Ryanair has felt the strain, however, its partnership with 15below has helped the team there to remain calm under pressure, safe in the knowledge that all customer notifications would be processed in the usual way, no matter the volume.
Where possible, Ryanair provides its customers with alternative flight options when performing cancellations. The new option is presented dynamically to the customer in the 15below notification with the following options:
1. Change flight for free.
2. Re-accommodate via alternative transportation.
3. Cancel with reimbursement.
The 15below platform allows Ryanair to:
- Quickly and efficiently send high volumes of notifications with no impact on processing speed.
- Easily manage double the volume of notifications typically sent during a year – particularly as we don’t charge per email sent.
- Significantly reduce the time and resource required to send communications vs. manual processing.
- Send via multiple channels to ensure optimum reach with customers.
- Free call centre agents from manual work, allowing them to perform critical and revenue-generating tasks instead.
- Utilise two-way notifications to confirm itinerary changes, track and process refunds, and provide visibility throughout the business.
- Provide a facility for passengers to opt for a reimbursement in the form of credit for future travel, with the automatic issuance of a travel credit voucher.
David Wall, Service Design and Transformation Manager, Ryanair
"I don’t know where we’d have been without the 15below platform this past year. Being able to send 89 million notifications to communicate effectively with every one of our affected customers without having to change any of our processes was a huge relief at a time when our operational staff were under immense pressure.
Whilst everything else seemed to change from one day to the next, 15below was unwavering in its support, and we knew they had our passenger communications covered.”
