12 SimplyFly – #9, 2018 Q: You mentioned personalised communications. What do you mean by that? A: We are changing the way we communicate with our customers and we will use new digital channels. We acknowledge that people in different parts of the world use different tools to communicate and the smartphone is becoming key to this. In many areas WhatsApp, Messenger and other tools are used heavily for instance. We call our solution ‘Mobile First’. This means that the portal is designed from the outset to be used on a mobile phone as the design is easier to fit on to an iPad, laptop or PC from there. Whereas, if designed the other way around, the screen material is often too large to easily fit onto a mobile phone. So, from the beginning the solution will be supported by all devices. Our communications with customers need to be more proactive so we are looking at all these new channels, including social media omnichannel. No matter how the customer wishes to engage with us – and it will be entirely their choice – all the channels used will be talking together and totally synchronised. Q: When will the new portal go live and what will be on it? A: Go live is early 2019. It will incorporate all the functions already mentioned, but we are also going to combine technical data with transactional data. As an example, when a customer buys a part, we know from the aircraft manuals that the part he has bought will interact with another part on the aircraft, which might need to be changed, so this will be alerted to the customer. It is far better that the parts are bought at the same time, rather than run the risk of the other part failing later, which might cause an AOG situation. We believe this will increase customer satisfaction. Q: How will the portal improve the customer experience? A: We have a number of ideas but it is important that we do this step by step and build on experience so the customer sees consistent and gradual progress rather than waiting for one ‘big bang’. We will continue to build in new features based on feedback from our customers. However, we do have high ambitions and really want to take this to a new level in terms of customer experience and this is the first step on a long digital transformation. Q: Have you looked at other industries/platforms to learn from them? A: Yes we have. We have looked at the sort of service solutions you get at home from providers such as Amazon. We don’t want searches that are difficult, time-consuming and not really working. So we design it in a similar way as you would experience in consumer portals and it will be designed to be more consumer-oriented overall. As we are connected to Airbus Skywise, an open aviation data platform offering e.g. advanced predictive analytics, we are looking to see how we can add value to our customers in the future with services based on data. This sounds easy but it is not; the future scope will be very complex. However, it is aspirational and we are working on a solution that could be with us in about the next two years. Also the portal gives us possibilities to create a much bigger role for Satair and, for example, to start selling a much larger parts scope. In other words to become a bit more like Amazon, to bring efficiency to our customers and giving them the convenience to buy more at one place, saving them a lot of time and adding real value.
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