AIRLINES & ALLIANCES

GLO WAF Interview: Jill Doyle, Managing Director MileagePlus, United Airlines (Full Interview)

0:00 - Introduction to MileagePlus • 01:05 - Main KPIs of MileagePlus • 02:40 - United's approach to personalisation and CX • 03:45 - On Kinective Media • 07:23 - On United's Traveller Commerce Platform and approach to partnerships • 08:20 - On innovation and areas of growth • 09:40 - One prediction for 2025 • 11:30 - "Million Miles" question • 12:09 - "Magic Wand" • 13:45 - Advice to younger self

GLO

• 0:00 Introduction to MileagePlus
• 01:05 Main KPIs of MileagePlus
• 02:40 United’s approach to personalisation and CX
• 03:45 On Kinective Media
• 07:23 On United’s Traveller Commerce Platform and approach to partnerships
• 08:20 On innovation and areas of growth
• 09:40 One prediction for 2025
• 11:30 “Million Miles” question
• 12:09 “Magic Wand”
• 13:45 Advice to younger self

Transcript:

00:00

GLO: Jill, it’s great catching up with you at the World Aviation Festival in Amsterdam. Can you please start by introducing yourself to our members?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Thank you for having me. I’m Jill Doyle. I’m the managing director of Mileage Plus at United Airlines, one of the longest-running programs in the world.

00:21

GLO: Can you give us a little bit of background history?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: We became a program in 1981, and we’re over 40 years old. We’re one of the first ones. We had a very successful run, but I’d say about seven years ago, we ramped up on our member growth, we ramped up on appealing to a broader general base. We’ve always appealed to and taken really good care of our premier customers, and that’s going to continue to be core to who we are, but we’re now venturing into other places, which was important for us to make sure we’re scaling to a general member base as well.

01:05

GLO: Loyalty programs, in the last few years, have been struggling with customer retention and customer satisfaction, especially after coming out of the COVID phase. What is your approach to customer retention, and what are your main KPIs?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Number one is driving customer value and doing the right thing for the customer. Over the last several years, we’ve virtually gotten rid of every single fee associated with miles for redemption. We have made it, so miles don’t expire ever. We’ve promised our customers that they can always have those miles. We’ve made it easy to use miles, so you can use miles for virtually anything at United, and you can use it as a split payment form to make things more affordable. We have money plus miles, and those are just a few things we’ve done to appeal to that broader member base. And this mile is not expiring.

02:00

GLO: I think it’s a great move because it’s one of the main frustrations people have collecting miles. Many think, “I won’t even bother to collect because it will expire.”

Jill Doyle, United Airlines:  Absolutely. And that is to your point about metrics. What metrics are we looking at? We’re constantly looking at how often people use their miles as an engagement metric. It’s really important to us that they see value in the program and that we want customers to be able to engage with us at all parts of their journey, at any time in their journey. And so, it’s really helpful to continue to keep a finger on the pulse, on their engagement metrics being using of their miles. And, of course, if they never expire, they have a lot of opportunities to do that.

02:40

GLO: I was just listening to your panel, and you told your own life story about travelling for business being different from travelling with three kids. So, what is United’s approach to personalisation and the customer experience?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: As you mentioned, I travel for work a fair amount when I’m by myself, and I also travel with my three children. I think I’m a good use case to say even personalisation isn’t enough, right? United might know who I am, but that’s not enough. We need to ensure we’re giving customers more than that. We need to give them specifics as to what they might need on that specific journey. And so that’s something that we’re really diving into with our new Kinective Media. We’re using data (using 120 different measurements) to really understand who the customer is, using both behavioural, demographic, and all sorts of different things that we can look at to understand who they are at their core and what they need at that moment.

03:45

GLO: Kinective Media is, as I just heard, a world-leading innovative approach spearheaded by United. So, what was the idea behind it?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: We have a rich history of connecting with customers and having that lifelong connection with them. We realised we were connecting with customers in a unique way, but we also had this wealth of understanding of who they are and what really makes them tick. So, we made a distinguished effort and decision to actually launch our own company alongside Mileage Plus called Kinective Media. And what it is: it’s a media, a travel commerce platform, that allows us to reach customers at all parts of their journey using Mileage Plus and, beyond that, our customer data to give them the right advertisement or the right content in the right moment. And if you think about that, it’s beyond just on the aeroplane. It’s within their mobile app. It’s within the gate areas or in our clubs. It’s, of course, onboard, which is a great time to reach a great customer base and then out when they’re in the world.

We can also partner with many different companies to make sure that we’re reaching those customers with the same messaging. It’s a really powerful tool to connect with our customer base in a unique and different way than we historically have, and it’s fully integrated with our Mileage Plus program. So I can spend my miles and use my miles. Plus, I can maybe talk a little bit about a use case. As you know, we always try to find opportunities to reach the right customer. So, in a Spanish-speaking market, we might be able to offer an advertisement for a Spanish-speaking streaming service, and as such, we can then provide that throughout the booking journey. We can provide it on board, and then, at that moment, there might be a promotion that goes to that subscription service that also comes with bonus miles. So, you may not be able to pay with bonus miles, at least not yet, but our goal is to always integrate those miles as a component throughout the entire journey. The real value add for our customers is that they’re able to get unique content that’s relevant to them in the right moment. Perhaps we can offer a mileage ticket for our mileage accrual bonus as well.

06:20

GLO: One of the things you’re great at is real-time personalisation and your ability to connect with your members, which also shows in your revenues. I was just looking at your revenue chart over the last 40 years, which is a straight line pointing up. Congratulations.

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Thank you. In mileage retailing, we’ve made a lot of innovations to try and drive that, but again, it’s all coming down to that personalised understanding of our customers. We’re trying to do that even in operations. We might need to tell a customer how to get to the next best place during an unfortunate hurricane or offer them an alternative flight that they might not have thought about but is personal to them. So, for example, if you are flying to Omaha, maybe getting somewhere nearby is good enough, so we would offer them a different route. Again, taking that personalised data is important to drive that customer value.

07:23

GLO: Your Traveller Commerce Platform sounds like one of those super apps everybody is talking about launching. What is your approach to partnerships? Where do you see yourself growing?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: The number one thing is to drive the right partnerships. We’re open to discussing this with everybody. We have a wonderful population of customers that we want to reach. We tend to have a fairly affluent population as we are a premier airline. And so, there are a lot of partners that are excited to work with us to reach that customer base. But as I mentioned, we have a very extensive general member base, and so, really, the sky is the limit because we are able to get down to that one-on-one level. It’s really important that the same offer for me might differ depending on who I’m travelling with. And so we’re able to do that with this immense amount of data and technology we’ve created.

08:20

GLO: What is next up for innovation?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: That’s a great question. I think in the session we were just in, Harold talked a little bit about social. I think it is deepening the engagement with our customers. It’s going beyond the data and actually meeting them where they don’t even realise they want to be met is what will drive that emotional connection to the airline, to Mileage Plus, and eventually create that lifelong connection that we’re striving for. You know, it’s really interesting to see the million milers who have been in our program for years. They have an emotional attachment that we want to continue to drive for generations to come. And to do that, we’re going to have to continue to innovate, and the way to do that is to make sure that we can personalise that experience for customers.

09:10

GLO: Which areas are you focusing on for growth?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: As part of United Airlines, we are growing faster than ever. I think we will have 800 planes delivered in the next few years, and our growth is unprecedented. We’re flying to more places than we ever have. So making sure that we can do that in a strong fashion that allows customers to feel like we can know who they are, even as we’re growing that base, is going to be really important.

09:40

GLO: I would like to ask you to make one prediction for the loyalty industry in 2025 – what do you think will be the focus?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: You’ll hear it a lot at this conference. AI is going to be continuing to be at the forefront. I think it’s the companies that continue to do that well and dive into technology and data in a way that we haven’t, using not only analytical AI but Gen AI in a way that allows the customer to feel that they’re reached in a personal way, is going to continue to be a really heavy focus.

10:18

GLO: And is this something United is focusing on?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Absolutely, yes. It is the core of Connective Media. It took us a while to get where we are. It’s very difficult to get the customer identity and the place that you need it to be to be able to deliver those results. But along with our Connective Media launch, we’re also launching free Wi-Fi, and Starlink will come on board in 2025, which is basically a living room in the sky, is how we’re calling it because it’s going to be 5g speeds everywhere you are in the air, which has continued to be a frustrating customer pain point. It’s going to be a key differentiator. So when you couple that free Wi-Fi of Starlink in 2025 with the data and the technology that we have access to, we’re going to be able to create a really wonderful experience for customers that we think will drive them to continue to fly united, and it’s a great flight experience.

11:09

GLO: On top of that, through Kinective Media, you also have the day-to-day, everyday connection.

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Exactly right. And on board, we can offer them something relevant to wherever their destination is, or maybe they’re on their way home. There are really wonderful, rich offers we can give to customers to make them feel that we know who they are.

11:30

GLO: Global Loyalty Organization has a tradition of asking three personal questions at the end of every interview. So, the first question I would like to ask is: If you had 1 million miles and could spend them any way you like, what would you do?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: That’s pretty easy. I would take my family on a trip. I enjoy travelling with my kids very much. I’ve been lucky enough to do so by working at United for as long as I have. I think my top two bucket list places are Cape Town and New Zealand, so I have a lot of work to do to get there, but I will do those. Those are the first two I would go to.

12:09

GLO: If you had a magic wand, and with a touch of a button, you could invent a new loyalty feature. What would you invent?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: I don’t know exactly what this looks like, and again, it’s taking it a little step further to understanding what customers want and need at that moment. I talked a little bit about knowing if I’m travelling for business or with my kids; that’s easy to understand. I think the next unlock that I haven’t figured out yet myself is if you can find out if I’m travelling for pleasure, if I’m travelling for, unfortunately, a funeral, if I’m travelling for a wedding, for a special occasion, I think there are wonderful ways we could connect with customers if they were willing to share that data with us, and if there was a way to do it in a seamless way that didn’t create too much friction. Again, don’t have the unlock yet, but I think being able to have our flight attendants acknowledge or not acknowledge a customer who’s having a hard day, it’s kind of like a red, yellow, green indicator, like, don’t talk to me right now, I think is a really powerful tool that we haven’t quite unlocked, and would make people feel a lot happier about flying united. You know, this is something we hear a lot, especially from our airline members, making the connection between the data you have and the seamless customer experience and being able to act on it in real-time and leading to customer satisfaction.

13:45

GLO:  Imagine you could talk to your younger self just starting out in the industry. What would you advise yourself?

Jill Doyle, United Airlines: Make sure you continue to make new experiences, take new roles, and always learn. It’s so important. I still try to strive for this as a working mom, and I love what I do. I love working for United I love connecting people, and I think it’s just so important to keep that part of your younger self so you’re happy. You know, we’re all trying to make the world a better place, and that’s a great way to do it.

Source: GLO