00:00 Introduction - 01:04 Key takeaways from "Transformation in modern retailing" discussion - 03:20 On Amadeus's customer-centric approach - 10:11 On the importance of journey-mapping - 12:47 On creating a better end-to-end experience for the customer - 14:29 On the value add of retailing transformation
GLO00:00 Introduction
01:04 Key takeaways from “Transformation in modern retailing” discussion
03:20 On Amadeus’s customer-centric approach
10:11 On the importance of journey-mapping
12:47 On creating a better end-to-end experience for the customer
14:29 On the value add of retailing transformation
Transcript:
00:00
GLO: Dear Danielle, it is an absolute pleasure to meet you here at at the Amadeus Loyalty Conference Amadeus offices in Nice. Would you mind introducing yourself and talking a little about your role?
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: My name is Danielle Colla, I am a Senior Manager at Amadeus leading a transversal team of product managers. Our focus is the retailing transformation and how we can deliver on the industry promise of customer centric retailing. So we look at what that means, how can we achieve it, what are the priorities, what are the trends in that space and we work really transversally across the business domains in airline solutions but even further beyond, working cross-functionally across Amadeus, bringing together diverse teams to figure out what is the problem, how can we fix it. So that’s what my team is focusing on at the moment, and that includes some of the topics we covered over the last few days of what loyalty and rewards have become and how they contribute to that retailing transformation.
01:04
GLO: Yesterday morning, you led a panel session about the transformation in modern retailing; what were the key takeaways? Can you share that with us?
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: Some of my key takeaways were that we need to get the basics right; that’s been a theme throughout the event. We can’t launch ourselves into a vast, complex transformation if we don’t know what our strategy is and what we’re trying to achieve and see what we can already achieve on the current stack. There are always capabilities that can be used and unlocked to achieve some of the airline’s goals.
Some of the airlines discussed the fact that it can be a bit difficult to build that business case towards retailing transformation, and we all agreed to take it gradually, case by case, and figure out the use cases that will bring value—unlock value that you cannot achieve in the current ecosystem. So, a trend that we’re seeing is bringing multi-faceted multi-competency teams together to achieve this retailing capability. For example, bringing under one roof more of the ancillary offering as well as the loyalty part, the Martech aspects, digital, and so forth so that you can have a common decision maker.
One of the airlines said that you need to do it in phases. You need to start by getting the organisation right. So, first, get the buy-in from management to structure the organisation and help execute the retail transformation. So that was their first step. Then, when they were doing this, they realised there was a whole new set of skills that they needed to develop or acquire before they could launch themselves into what was their third step was focusing on building a customer 360, having a customer data platform that can then integrate with their full ecosystem as that basis in the first step towards a broader retailing transformation. So they confirmed the idea that if we’re going towards customer-centric retailing, the first step is to know your customers, identify your customers, who they are, and what they need.
03:20
GLO: Can you share with us what Amadeus’s customer-centric approach is?
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: We’re taking a multifaceted approach to this topic. We have some capabilities already today. We’re looking at the industry trends. I think we all know that, especially in loyalty, there are some trends towards more gamification and engagement. There is diversifying the reward capabilities. There’s a move, and we discussed it in some of the breakouts, towards unbundling the benefits of the loyalty tiers to be more flexible and to be able to target the customer with the right benefit that makes sense to them at the right time on the right journey and the right experience. We also have touched upon subscriptions.
Then we start looking at those trends, and we say that gradually, everything is going to be so diverse that we can no longer just rely on a tier level to make a decision. We have to go down to the individual level to see the vision and trends. We see the trends towards things like digital IDs – a topic that was discussed in the panel. It’s no longer an argument between an airline and a distributor over who owns the customer and the data. The customer owns their data, and over the next couple of years, especially in the EU, that will actually be coming to our hands in our phones. We will be owning that data. We will have a digital identity. But what does that mean? How fast is everyone moving towards this?
Another topic during the panel discussions was “When is a one-size-fits-all okay?” And we all agreed that’s on the basics: The brand alignment, the security, and on-time performance. It’s the bottom of your Maslow hierarchy, as you mentioned. Flights need to work. But then you start looking at when do I segment, when do I contextualise and when do I go to an individual level? So we agreed globally that it’s content that we want to differentiate. How do we bundle, which offer do we put towards which customer, and which payment options? We were discussing merging commercial and redemption flows into one, including potentially upselling to a business class and starting to bring in that knowledge of the loyalty experience that they’ve had. How far are they from their next tier? Does it look like they’re going to miss their next tier? And can we sweeten the deal to ensure they convert, retain their tier and bring more upsell revenue to the airline?
But that always comes back to that first step that the airlines were saying: you need the organisation in place to make those decisions and have accountability for how I put the right offer to the right customer. So this is the trend that we’re seeing. But so people are concerned about price discrimination. And they’re more focused today on bringing at least a level of contextualisation and segmentation. Some examples that keep coming up are, for long-haul, in the school holidays, two adults, two kids – you could already make a far more customised offer without knowing who they are. You just can tell that they’re likely to prefer flights at a certain time of day, probably to prefer a direct flight. They’ll be looking for the cheapest option, probably possible, but with some amenities, you need to make sure they have bags if they’ve gone for two weeks. That already is a level of contextualisation that will bring value to the industry. So these are some of the topics that we’re discussing. That’s what we saw coming out of the panel. So focus on your organisation and your strategy, make sure you have the right skill set, and then focus on getting the tech in place to actually execute it. So those are some of the things. So that’s one aspect I was mentioning that we were looking at. We look at the trends, and we interview airlines. We’re working very closely with our strategic partners and airlines to figure out how quickly this is happening.
So what do we need to do now? We’re seeing a trend that we’re exploring as well. One of my team members presented on stage: to achieve those offers, if you really are going to get to that, not segment of one, but a micro-segmented offer, you need to know who the customer is way earlier than we do today. So we’re seeing a trend of airlines experimenting with not quite forced login but encouraging heavily to login. They’re looking at lighter account creation and everything they can to encourage customers to self-identify as soon as possible so they can make the relevant offers to them. So that’s one trend that we’re seeing.
The other thing we need to keep in mind is that we need to look at it from an end-to-end perspective. You can’t just make a wonderful offer if you can’t service that offer when you can’t deliver on that offer. So another thing we’re getting strongly as feedback is the times when that really counts in an experience with the customer. What do you do during a disruption? How do you recover them during disruption? How do you communicate better, give more transparency and more information at the right time, and guide the customers, especially with the trend towards increased importance of non-frequent travellers? How do you help their experience be smooth? And so that’s another trend that we’re seeing is really around communicating with customers the right information at the right time. So it’s not just about transforming the offer. It’s making sure that you can service and do the end-to-end part. One of the other things we’re doing is looking at the trends and engaging with airlines to understand their priorities, how ready they are, and what they want to achieve.
My team is also focused on journey mapping, so we are evangelising within the organisation; what does it mean to be traveller-centric? How to think like a traveller? We’ve done multiple workshops with different business domains with multicultural groups, putting ourselves into different personas and asking ourselves, “Where are the challenges? Where are the pain points?” And then thinking, “Okay, what could the future look like? It’s not a perfect, seamless, fully integrated experience, but what could an improved experience look like?” Then, you can start mapping the areas that will really help jump that experience and bring more satisfaction from the customers. And then you can start saying, okay, instead of focusing on features and capabilities, what do I need to do to deliver that experience? And can I do it today? Do I need to wait for the full industry transformation? And which value-added use cases does it unlock? So this is the approach that we’re taking: end-to-end journey mapping, figuring out where all the pain points are, which capabilities are needed, and prioritising them according to long-term, short-term, medium-term complexity, and which value it unlocks.
10:11
GLO: And this approach will really help your clients because you’re breaking it down into individual pain points and taking it step-by-step. Most airlines would say there is a problem with getting the right data at the right time. They don’t know what to do with the data, or they don’t have access to the data. So, the whole vision sounds very logical, and that’s where we want to be. But the journey there can be very, very daunting and challenging because, in some organisations, it might also mean organisational change. You need to restructure. How do you help your customers at Amadeus to achieve that?
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: As part of the journey mapping and capabilities, we gather feedback from our airlines. We present a vision, and we understand because we’ve done the internal work of what it would take to get there, but this is where we really rely on that feedback. We need feedback from the airlines. Are you ready? Is this something you could implement as an organisation? And as I mentioned earlier, quite often, we come to the decision of “Okay, you want to prioritise a customer with a high lifetime value for a certain seat.” How does that information get into the hands of revenue management? Who makes that call? Who makes that decision on that last seat? Who gets it? And the use case I mentioned about sweetening the deal a bit, who takes the decision? And who takes the cost associated? Because all of these additional benefits you provide to the customer will have a cost, but they’ll also have a revenue uplift over time. So it’s finding that balance and complexity and figuring out which pain points we could solve without necessarily going through the full transformation. This is how we’re approaching it. We get an understanding of what could be done and how we could do it, but the airline feedback and understanding of their strategy, readiness and priorities is crucial for us. This is why these events are so wonderful: to put the collective brains together and figure out where we start. And thankfully we’re seeing, we’re all aligned on the vision, and we see that you could start small and gradually build additional capabilities. You don’t need to go full-blown, getting rid of all of the old ways of doing things. You could start progressively on the channel, a use case, or a new type of ancillary that you could do, but maybe the current infrastructure wouldn’t allow it. You can start small.
12:47
GLO: You are using your partners’ data to improve their data flow.
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: Absolutely. We work closely with some of our strategic partners. We have complementary strategic partnerships to start building connectors that make it easier for airlines to execute, share the data, share the insights across their ecosystem and ensure we can deliver added value to them. We often use the example of Adobe, where we can know the customer’s browsing behaviour and what they’ve looked at. We may not know that customer, but knowing what they’ve looked at, we can then use that to make more relevant offers. You can do that today in the booking flow. You can make it more relevant by connecting the dots. Another thing we can do is we can detect that there’s been a disruption for a customer and make that information available throughout all of these different touch points, be it customer care, CRM, or the digital touchpoints, and that can then be used to drive a better end-to-end experience for a customer as well. So one of the things that we’re strongly looking at is figuring out how do we maximise the ecosystem for the airlines, knowing where we’re present and where we’re strong and where our partners excel, and bringing that together to build on a better experience for the airlines, their analysts, their users, their frontline, and the customers, of course, the customers at the heart of everything.
14:29
GLO: That’s really great to hear. Today, in one of the breakout sessions, one of the airlines said if they have a frequent flyer customer and their flight has been delayed five times, he won’t know it unless he searches for a specific person, and only then will the system show that this person has been delayed for five times. So, it’s good to hear that you’re working on solutions to make this the connection.
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: One of the retailing transformation added value will also be easier servicing and the ability to get way more proactive about things. We’ve all experienced the feeling of being the last person at the baggage carousel. Where’s my bag? And then you have to wait in a long queue and get serviced, whereas often that data does exist, it’s just not connected, activated, and used in a way, in an easy way because of the, let’s say, the legacy. But much of that technology is now available, and we can start connecting those dots. We can start getting proactive and then connect through the ecosystem to contact the customer, let them know their bag didn’t make the flight, and guide them through the process. We could start thinking about pre-filling different claims and cases and things like that. The possibilities are endless once we get on the journey and start connecting.
15:53
GLO: Dear Danielle, it’s been an absolute pleasure to catch up with you. Thank you very much for sharing your insights, and we look forward to catching up again soon.
Danielle Colla, Customer Experience Excellence Product Senior Manager, Amadeus: Absolutely. It’s been great to meet you after the predictions that we filmed earlier in the year. We’re starting to see some of them really becoming true and I look forward to further discussions on the topics.
Source: GLO
