It’s a fierce market out there for airlines across the globe.
Changing customer behaviour and a push to innovate means airlines have to deliver an excellent customer experience across multiple digital touch points – all while staying profitable and embracing the travel tech revolution. Customers expect value for money, while airlines are under the thumb to find new opportunities for growth. When delivering solutions for the aviation industry, Dimension Data’s subsidiary brand, Merchants takes a thorough and practical approach to finding new opportunities that are focused on growing a business. Through specialist contact centres, these businesses have relied on an expert ability to deliver the right blend of people, processes and technology to embrace the digital future that customers want. Customer behaviours are changing, as are their expectations when it comes to dealing with any airline. As customer advocates, Merchants will help you identify opportunities for growth, while ensuring you’re prepared for the future. Our partnerships in the aviation industry are built on a firm focus on evolving a customer strategy.
Vision
Why the aviation industry needs to innovate to service customers
Business survival depends on loyalty, and any airline’s future success relies on continuous innovation, and that’s a tough ask - especially when customers have high service expectations.
To keep airline companies flying high, Merchants has been a trusted partner with the right expertise that knows how to address aviation-specific business challenges such as:
• delivering a consistent, seamless experience across multiple touch points
• identifying new ways to reduce costs, drive sales and grow customer loyalty
• optimising the use of AI, chatbots and self-service for a better customer experience
• using big data effectively for better customer insight and behaviour prediction
• keeping up with continuous changes in rules and regulations
• driving process efficiencies and driving cultural change
Transformation
How the aviation industry innovated to improve customer experience
Differentiation through service means attracting the right profile person for the role. Merchants believes in recruiting the right positive attitude, to deliver the right customer experience. Empowered people deliver quick, helpful and professional service.
Service complexity and consistency is a challenge, as is the growing demand for multi-skilled agents that can resolve customer queries. That’s why Merchants assists agents, teams and managers through decision support tools and assists with knowledge databases, improved customer insights, which are drawn from big data and quality methodologies, and assists with support and training.
Providing integrated multi-channel customer service centres across multiple business units, Merchants provides the right customer experiences to support business operations, driving a customer-first culture. Merchants tailor-made approach delivers unique customer service solutions that differentiates their clients from their competitors.
Results
What customer experience did for the aviation industry. Our partnerships in the aviation industry are built on a firm focus on evolving your customer strategy and we achieve this through driving more customer convenience and personalised insight at every touch point. We believe in advising on IT tools, AI and digital platforms for future success and help identify upsell, cross-sell and other sales opportunities. Global benchmarking and competitive horizon scanning is important for any organisation to ensure they are staying ahead in the market. Further benefits as a result of improved customer experience are: ZAR124 million saving in operational costs over a five-year period, solving six month back office backlogs to real-time resolution, PCI solution for card payments, 97% drop in chargebacks through additional authentication and security, over 90% drop in complaints and call efficiency rate up from 7% to 80%
