3 Keys to Great Airline Customer Experiences

The lingering impacts of Covid-19, rising fuel costs, and widespread staffing issues have led to a long string of headaches in the airline customer experience. Frustrated guests are experiencing last-minute canceled flights and long hold times when they try to rebook. And customer service representatives, ill-equipped to handle every call, are burning out. 

Combine that with common flight issues, like lost luggage, high costs for flight changes, and confusing rebooking processes, and you’ve got a cocktail of customer service pain points making everybody unhappy. 

So how can airlines provide exceptional passenger experiences when faced with all of these challenges? Here are three keys to up your airline customer experience and simultaneously alleviate the burden on your team. 

Diversified support channels 

Travel and hospitality companies largely use voice and IVR to address customer needs, but these systems are no longer agile enough to address the increasing needs of guests, and those guests are demanding more from the airlines they fly with. 

Let’s say a customer gets a last-minute notification that their flight was canceled. They’re panicking. They need to talk to an airline representative immediately to find a new flight, but too often they have to go through the hassle of a robotic IVR menu or wait on hold for an hour to speak with someone who can help them. 

Diversifying your support channels can be a great solution for many of these types of situations. Offering a variety of ways for customers to get in touch reduces their time spent on hold and gives customers wider and easier access to assistance. 

Intelligent cloud contact center technology like UJET’s Mobile SDK enables you to expand your airline's customer support channels to things like email, live chat, scheduled calls, or immediate calls, all of which can be accessed in-app. This way, guests don’t have to wait around on the phone all day or send an email with no idea when they’ll get a response. 

Personalized, context-rich customer service 

One of the biggest pain points for customers in any industry is when they have to call into a business more than once to resolve an issue. That becomes an even bigger headache when they have to repeat themselves to an entirely different agent who doesn’t know anything about their issue or have the context to effectively assist them. Customers don’t feel like they are known or appreciated when the service they receive is inconsistent. 

Intelligent call center platforms like UJET solve this issue by enabling metadata collection. This allows your agents to see relevant and rich context about each customer, such as their current location, outgoing flight, incoming flight, questions they’ve asked before, and what version of the airline app they’re using. With this information, agents can more easily troubleshoot customer issues, which reduces the wait time for all of your customers. 

Customers can also authenticate their account information using smart and safe biometric technology, like facial recognition scans, fingerprint verification, screenshots of important documents (such as vaccination cards or COVID-19 test results), and more. This streamlines the entire experience and makes the travel experience more pleasant for customers and staff alike.

Context-rich customer service made available through cloud center software also allows you to:

• Automatically record the information you collect directly to your CRM so that all future agents know how to assist specific customers and those customers’ records stay accurate
• Blend communication channels as needed so you can hop from messaging to a phone call without losing any context
• Shorten wait times by collecting information via in-app data and SMS while customers are on hold. 

By utilizing smart cloud contact center technology for your airline, you have the flexibility to choose where your guests’ data is stored (CRM, public cloud storage, private data repository, etc.) which significantly reduces the risk of exposure and gives you and your guests further peace of mind. 

Automated customer service and practical AI

Coupled with context, practical AI features allow you to reduce hold times for customers even further without sacrificing the quality of the customer experience. Consider virtual agents. 

Intelligent cloud call center technology allows customers to interact with smart and personable virtual agents who engage like human beings and are equipped to resolve hundreds of types of queries.

Virtual agents can execute a variety of tasks that would otherwise tie up your customer service reps and increase hold times, such as: 

• Managing airline reservations
• Updating a guest’s contact information
• Canceling a guest’s trip or upgrading their seat assignment 
• Collecting information from guests before transferring them to the correct department

If a customer is in need of further assistance or has a more complex request, the virtual agent can easily escalate their query to a live agent who has all of the rich customer context they need (including queries guests have already made).

By upgrading your airline contact center technology to CCaaS 3.0, you can provide guests with a consistent and pleasant travel experience no matter where their journey takes them.