SWISS E-Sales and E-CRM

Introduction

The lecture of Luca Graf, former Head of Online Sales SWISS, offered some insights into SWISS‘ E-Sales and into the E-CRM. If not cited differently the content in this blog entry is based on the presentation of the lecturer or the accompanying slides (Graf, 2018). SWISS serves 17 Mio guests per year and generates a revenue of 5 billion CHF per year (Handelszeitung, 2018). The airline can be considered as too big for the niche market and too small to dominate the mass market. Therefore, SWISS needs to find an appropriate strategy to increase their profit. The competition in the airline industry is extremely high and on the other hand customers have a very high transparency. Customers look for information on the internet and can find almost everything they want to know. Further, customers want to be entertained, like a high level of convenience and are price sensitive.

New Strategy

To establish the SWISS brand a strategy with five pillars was created. The strategy includes motivated staff, investments in new aircrafts and services, competitive online market presence, improvements in efficiency and cost-structure. Further, with the new strategy SWISS wants to impress passengers with attractive products and services, for example with new digital products and services. In the past, only single services could be selected on the website such as seat reservation or special meals. Since 2015 it is possible to bundle different services and purchase a package that includes seat reservation, additional baggage and/or special meals. The goal is to offer individualised offers at all touch points. In order to reach this goal, the airline needs to know everything about their customers and then sell an individual and tailor-made product to them.

Sales Channels

Figure 1: Sales Channels of an Airline

In Figure 1 the different sales channels can be seen. People booking through OTAs are the most price sensitive customers and therefore the OTAs are a low margin channel. Airport Ticket offices and call centres are not used for ticket sales often these days. These offices are almost only used for services nowadays.

The most vital sales channel for SWISS are the corporate travel agencies and the tour operators. Through this channel SWISS generates 39% of their sales volume and 61% of their sales value. Many business trips are booked over a tour operator or a travel agency, moreover, business guests often prefer business- or first-class tickets. Therefore, a high value can be generated through this channel.

The second most important channel is the airline website. Through this channel 44% of the sales volume and 30% of the value is generated. This numbers include upmost leisure travellers or private customers. The goal of SWISS is that 50% of the sales volume is generated through the own website. Moreover, the airline can reduce its cost with direct online bookings. SWISS only needs to pay for the servers, the e-commerce team and the service centre. A direct online sales platform offers several advantages. The airline can present its product best on their own website and the platform is always accessible all over the world (24/7). Further, SWISS can up- and cross-sell products and services on the platform. The airline can sell an experience and can enrich the flight with additional features. Moreover, sales, servicing and interaction takes place on one platform and therefore a full brand experience can be ensured and the customer loyalty can be increased. On the other hand, a physical service centre is needed for customer support and also the reach of the brand is limited through the limited marketing budget of the airline.

The relaunch of SWISS.COM

In 2014, SWISS started to plan the relaunch of its website. The relaunch of the website was needed due to rapidly changing customer needs on the world wide web. Customers are very used to advanced websites and have high expectations when going on a corporate website. Most important is of course that the website is available anytime to anyone and on any device. But only getting access to the website is not the only thing a customer expects, it goes far beyond that. The content should be personalized and relevant to the customer and the website should be highly user-friendly.

Prior to the relaunch, SWISS had different websites on different devices: one for desktop use and one for mobile on an app. When users switched devices, they had to adjust again to the different layout and navigation. This was especially problematic since mobile use increased.

All these circumstances motivated the responsible employees at SWISS to start with the relaunch. In cooperation with in total 9 external agencies, the team at SWISS had a vision of their website in mind. It was not only about functionality and transaction anymore, but the website visitor should already start to dream of their holidays when starting with their booking process.

When starting with such a major relaunch, there are three steps that have to be considered. The first one is the building of the new platform. In the case of SWISS.com, this was done very thorough and with the help and input of the different teams that were involved when talking about E-Sales. The Platform took everything from usability with the frond-end design or the content management to the web development with the coding and the site maintenance into consideration. Major parts of the SWISS.com platform architecture was developed inhouse because that offers the following advantages:

•         Specific knowledge, dedication understanding and passion for airline industry
•         Highest agility deploying resources according to the needs of LHG airlines
•         Full service team providing business analysis, development and testing
•         Flexible release plan (regularly every 2 weeks)

If one has built a good working and appealing platform, there is another step that has to be taken, and that is the one of how to bring traffic to the website. This can be achieved through various activities like direct traffic, retargeting of existing customers or marketing campaigns. However, a lot of traffic can be generated by paid search, so by paying per click. This is mostly done in the Google network with Google AdWords. The last step that has to be taken is optimising the flow and the user experience by constantly improving the website functions and the design. This is done with the help of A/B testing, by offering various design options and then choosing the one that has proven to be most efficient after the testing period. This step is mainly used to increase the conversion rate, since conversions are the clicks that generate revenue in the end.

One thing which was implemented on the website is a sharing function, so people can share articles or pictures which SWISS created about different destinations and other topics. This should develop an emotional attachment to the website and people should be more likely to stick to the website. Furthermore, the website is more personalized: data of potential customers is being saved, as well as their destination choices. The website brought many more benefits to the users. For instance, the customer gets shown different flights and can compare. Other than that, the new website provides relevant information only through the implementation of so-called widgets. It tries to involve the user, to make him browse and explore, be inspired by the miscellaneous destinations and offers. Additionally, an app named “logbook app” was launched. Said app compiles logbooks for each travel. In the logbook, all handy information about the destination is noted, as well as the flight statuses.

The results of the relaunch were highly positive: the whole project was a success. It generated more revenue for the company and at the same time improved the user experience of the customers. Still, the company decided since then to focus on smaller projects, instead of rolling out such a huge one. What the project manager did was breaking down the project into individual tasks. This strategy is labelled as the “Work Bundle Owner” Setup. Other than that, the project manager recommends doing continuous testing, controlling SEO, and doing a thorough planning.

Personalization

Personalization is a trend nowadays. The word is constantly present. It is a hot topic. But, what is it? Personalization is the tailoring of offers to the single customers according to the search history. This should result in higher sales for the company, a better user experience for the client, a higher brand loyalty, and an overall favourable relation between the customer and the firm.

Electronic Customer Relationship Management (E-CRM)

E-CRM stands for electronic customer relationship management. It applies information technology systems to fulfil customer needs (Techopedia, 2018). In SWISS, they have a tool labelled as the Optimization Engine, what leads to segmentation and, eventually, to personalization. In a first step, testing is conducted. In a second step, segmented content can be provided. In the end, once having identified the user, personalized content is possible. SWISS deploys a three-layered data model: first, there is the layer of customer data and information. On top comes the analytical layer. And in the end, we have the customer experience level, what is the result of the combination of data and analysis. An example: a business upgrading button is only served to those who are likely to realize such an upgrade. If one wants to follow this strategy, a clean data-base and a consistent technology infrastructure are required.

References

Graf, L. (2018). Lecture notes: SWISS E-Sales and E-CRM. 

Handelszeitung. (2018). Swiss erreicht einen Passagierrekord. Retrieved from www.handelszeitung.ch/unternehmen/airline-swiss-erreicht-einen-passagierrekord

Techopedia. (2018). Electronic Customer Relationship Management (E-CRM). Retrieved from www.techopedia.com/definition/30914/electronic-customer-relationship-management-e-crm