Recent years have been a roller-coaster ride for the Indian aviation industry. From three years of being in a no-fly zone, thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic, the business has recovered lost time to some extent.
But the aviation industry is one sector that’s infamous for customer service in the world.
At the CX+ summit organised by ETBrandEquity.com, the chief executive officer of Vistara, Vinod Kannan took his keynote address to a flying start as he asked the audience about the best experience that they have had on airlines across the globe.
He was quick to also speak about the other side. The airline industry scores the lowest NPS scores across businesses. “As an airline, we have numerous touchpoints that can lead to a bad experience. From the time you book your ticket, from the time that you actually come to the airport and try to get in over a long queue. From getting on the aircraft to the time you’ll reach your destination, there are so many kinds of contact points which airlines take you through. Therefore, it’s not so easy for us as airlines to please anyone. Therefore customer service and customer experience make a critical difference,” Kannan added.
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Kannan shared that at Vistara, that customer-focused culture sits on four different pillars. He said, “Vistara wants everyone to be open and transparent. We want everyone to be performance focused, we want everyone to be innovative. The most important of them all is customer centricity.”
Kannan spoke about Vistara’s Project Neev, a customer experience transformation program, which is designing customer experience for tomorrow. He elaborated on how Vistara will make sure that we implement this from a customer centric design perspective, that is all the projects, systems and SOPs and processes.
The third one is how the aviation brand will make sure that they engage their teams to deliver the program and build a culture.
“This journey is a process which involves stakeholders from various teams, we make sure that we involve not just the customer facing teams, but also the back office teams,” Kannan added.
Engaging teams is not enough. Another pillar is how Vistara will empower their teams to deliver this process.
In a freewheeling chat between Vistara’s Kannan and Anirban Chowdhury, senior assistant editor, The Economic Times the discussion veered towards how the brand has made emission investments, intersection between transportation and hospitality and the challenges faced on an everyday basis.
Kannan mentioned that when it comes to low cost versus full service, the lines are a bit blurred these days, because customers today are willing to pay a little bit more whether it’s a low cost airline, if you provide them an experience that is positive.
“From a customer experience perspective, the days of lower standards of service if one operated a low-price carrier and another kind of service for full fledged carriers are no longer there. So every airline out there, and in fact, every brand or every business out there has to make sure that the customer experience is something that is positive, something that customers are happy with,” Kannan added.
The fact that customer service in airlines is such a big challenge primarily, because from the operational side, regulation mandates everything from the breadth of the seat to the length of the aisle and there is a particular point in time where you cannot even go out to use the washroom.
Kannan accepted that it’s not easy when one has to maintain high levels of customer service and constraints in terms of rules and regulations on how to treat a customer once he is on board.
“It’s not easy. The good thing is that everyone knows that aviation is a bit regulated. Understanding the premium game and running premium carriers across the world is difficult,” he added.
Kannan shared the threshold that Vistara decides on the premiumness of what kind of customer service it wants to give as an airline, especially in a foodservice game.
“When it’s something to do with the customer, for example, offering meals, offering abilities on board, whether it’s in terms of providing, in fact, entertainment, it also comes at the cost, we make sure that we do not cut on them. So we try to make sure that from the whole cost efficiency perspective, it’s more in terms of our contracts, or non-customer facing ones,” Kannan added.
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