Soaring customer service: luxury airline innovates on social channels
The Challenge
A global luxury airline has built its reputation on enhancing both pre- and in-flight experiences — from economy to first class — by offering generous baggage allowances, award-winning entertainment systems, and gourmet meals.
While many competitors focus on cost-cutting, this airline has consistently prioritized passenger comfort. However, as the industry shifts towards an even more sophisticated customer experience (CX), maintaining this edge has become increasingly challenging.
"It’s no longer a luxury to provide the level of service that used to set us apart," explains the company’s head of marketing technology. "Other airlines are catching up, and we must innovate further to maintain our competitive edge."
Despite its success in delivering customer-centric products and interactions, the airline struggled to obtain a comprehensive view of its customers across online and offline channels. The team depended on a patchwork of social media platform reports and a manual system of collating data into spreadsheets. Operations were split between two teams: one for monitoring messages and another for handling direct messages. This fragmented approach not only created operational inefficiencies but also made it difficult to integrate data and accurately assess brand sentiment.
"Our underlying technology needs to support our customer-centric approach," says the head of martech. "But it will only work if people, processes and technology come together."
The team sought a unified solution to consolidate their social channels and gain comprehensive insights from a single platform.
The Solution
After evaluating several options, the company’s head of marketing technology noted, "Sprinklr was one of the only providers that could address all the aspects of social media management that we were looking for."
Competitive benchmarking establishes baseline CX
The airline’s decision to adopt Sprinklr was driven by the need to benchmark its existing customer experience. "It’s hard to sell CX initiatives within the company without a baseline," explains the airline’s head of marketing technology. "Sprinklr Insights helps us establish that crucial starting point and measure the impact of future customer-facing initiatives."
The airline is refining its dashboards to achieve optimal granularity by collecting data from a wide variety of sources, including review sites, app store reviews, call center logs, market research and surveys. This comprehensive approach aims to create a unified source of truth for the company’s CX operations, addressing the challenge of measuring the often intangible ROI associated with such initiatives.
One platform unifies all social channels
In addition to benchmarking, Sprinklr’s all-in-one platform consolidates all of the airline’s social channels, including popular social media platforms, travel websites and Google reviews. Previously, the social care team lacked the necessary resources and insights to efficiently scale its operations across these diverse channels. With Sprinklr Service, agents now benefit from a channel-agnostic approach that significantly enhance customer care.
“We have to meet customers where they are,” says the airline’s head of martech. "We now have a process in place to listen and monitor across all our channels, accumulate that data and efficiently respond to customers."
Holistic insights power better customer experiences
With the ability to measure customer sentiment across channels, the airline’s social care team can now understand customer experiences at scale throughout every stage of the customer journey. Insights from social listening help the team proactively address customer pain points, drive critical business decisions and refine the overall customer experience.
"Sprinklr’s automations and AI are fantastic," says the airline’s marketing enablement manager. "It's great when technology works seamlessly in the background, bringing operational efficiencies."
The Outcome
Within months of implementing Sprinklr, the solution was put to the ultimate test: an extreme weather event in a region where the airline operates resulted significant travel disruptions.
The airline's social channels were inundated with more than 10,000 messages per minute from concerned travelers. The head of martech says he was unsure how the airline’s social care team would keep up.
“It was so early after go-live that this incident happened, so I was quite anxious to see how the solution would perform,” he explains. “But the platform did exactly what it was meant to do. Sprinklr’s automatic routing and auto-response features gave our agents the tools they needed to handle the message volume with ease.”