Commercial airlines today are facing a host of challenges. The rising costs of aviation fuel, expanded passenger safety requirements, increased focus on sustainability and the implementation of new technologies to meet changing regulatory norms have escalated their operating costs, directly impacting their margins. Moreover, as most airlines operate on thin margins, they must ensure healthy occupancy rates to stay in business.
As the skies get more crowded, passengers have many airline options from which to choose. So, how can an airline ensure a steady flow of passengers on its flights? One possibility is to offer discounts and special offers. While this looks relatively simple, providing discounts reduces the airline’s margins and impacts its ability to provide service quality — a highly risky move in the long run. Another option is simply to provide them a memorable experience. After all, a positive experience encourages customers to return to the airline repeatedly and generates good word-of-mouth publicity. This publicity will almost certainly bring new customers to the airline’s fold and expand its customer base.
Although the benefits are clear, ensuring a memorable customer experience can be a challenging task. Understanding each passenger's unique requirements is crucial to providing a personal touch at every mile of the journey. And all the while, airlines must also ensure a higher demand and lower cost of sale.
Successfully decoding every passenger's needs in pursuit of creating personalized and memorable experiences depends on how well the airline collects and interprets their data. Information collected for each customer can be managed with a master data management platform that sources data strings from each input, ensures its accuracy and organizes it in a useful structure. But the data alone isn’t enough. Each customer’s data needs to be interpreted and understood to build a memorable experience for them.
This brings us to a crucial question – how can airlines enhance the customer experience while keeping their budgetary constraints in mind? The answer lies in HCLTech’s hyper-personalization solution, which employs advanced data analytics to provide more personalized and targeted products, services and content. It provides an in-depth view of the travelers' profiles and behavior patterns while avoiding data duplication. Moreover, it lets airlines' marketing teams better understand travelers' behavior, align budgets and promotions and devise customized communication methodologies.
Employing emerging technologies such as AI, ML and geo-fencing, HCLTech’s hyper-personalization solution helps develop and enhance customer journeys and profiles, and enabling airline marketers to make informed decisions regarding their marketing initiatives to achieve positive outcomes.
The aviation industry is facing significant challenges that increase costs and reduce margins. To succeed, airlines must acquire and retain customers to stay competitive in this highly competitive market. The HCLTech hyper-personalization solution can help airlines better understand their customers' needs and behaviors and build customized messaging, offers and promotions. With hyper-personalization and memorable customer experiences, airlines can pave the way for long-term growth.
