Two Airlines’ Tale: A CXM View

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Today most of the industries are significantly impacted due to the outbreak of the Covid-19, aka Corona Virus. The majority of the sectors are negatively affected except the likes of the pharmaceutical, which is booming as the prices of the hand sanitizer and mask have skyrocketed. In my view, the most negatively impacted industry is the airline industry. Every day, airlines are coming up with new policies regarding the cancellation and rescheduling of the flights. If I would derive an analogy for the current situation of the airlines' industry, it would be like an end-term examination where the syllabus (customer to be served) to be covered is humungous, with available time and resources highly constrained.

In these tests of time, some airlines are doing exceptionally good in terms of customer query resolution (customer experiencemanagement). At the same time, some have simply lost sight towards customer grievances redressal, and one such airline is GoAir. When one looks at the twitter page of the airline, then you can see that they are taking on an average two days to respond to customer’s tweet. We all know that today social media platforms are becoming a grievances redressal portal. But we need to understand why, in this scenario, customers are taking the help of twitter and other social media platforms to seek a solution to their problems. Firstly, none of the customer care numbers of airlines are working. Secondly, the only response you receive from the GoAir if you drop them an email is service ticket number. If you escalate the issue, then you will receive another service ticket number but no response at all. With the response time of the GoAir, one can very well imagine how miserably GoAir’s customer grievances redressal mechanism has failed.

Well, the situation is not the same for all the airlines, there are airlines like Vistara which are trying its best to serve the customer by formulating customer-friendly policies and by standing to what they commit. They are processing the full refund within 24 hours of lodging the query, which is reasonably good response time. It’s just not about the refunds... Vistara is leveraging social media platforms to resolve customer queries at a faster pace and thereby reducing the load over their call centers.
The likes of GoAir need to focus on long term benefits than short term benefits. Today such policies and attitude towards customers might help the airline to show good numbers on the balance sheet. However, in the long term, it will hit the brand reputation very severely. Likes of GoAir should try to adopt good practices from its industry partners to revamp their slow customer query resolution mechanism. Though airlines like Vistara might be losing money at this point but with its customer-friendly policy, it is winning customer loyalty, which will act as a competitive advantage for them in the future.

What else do you think Airlines should do???

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