The Northern Goshawk is well equipped for the cold, dark and snowy winter that will soon fall where I live in Canada. These birds are big and bulky with broad, rounded wings which curve in-flight to generate large amounts of lift efficiently. Their long, slinky tails give stability in even the strongest Arctic winds. Goshawks can reach 40 mph but their setup is quite similar to A330s and A350s which might fly 15x faster.
Goshawks are a successful species. As well as in Canada, you can find them in the United States, Scandinavia and Siberia. They are stealthy predators watching from on-high for their prey. Their flight is quick and agile, adapting to forest canopy or floor. Their wingbeats are slow and powerful, and they use gliding to optimise energy consumption. Goshawks’ in-built biometric tools help them succeed.
What can airlines learn from the rapacious raptors? Read on to find out…
The Northern Goshawk has excellent eyesight but poor hearing. Airlines can improve their “eyesight” and be more raptor to observe what customers see when they shop online for travel and flight experiences.
Successful online businesses have long been using clickstream data to understand what people click on, how many minutes they spend on each page and when they leave websites. The airline industry average is 5min56sec per session, although it does vary a bit. Air Canada scores high with 8min20sec, but WestJet’s only at 5min58sec. A best-in-class performer might achieve more because it offers a more engaging context.
Airlines use clickstream data to look carefully at how many people price up an itinerary, find insights about their check-in and baggage conditions or select a seat in advance. But in web search or online retailing, back-end systems are designed to optimise the front-end customer facing sales engine.
At airlines on the other hand the front-end is built on a tech-stack developed for travel agents long before anyone imagined people might book and buy their own tickets. Compliance with legacy technology is more important than user experience. This is why you can almost feel London-based British Airways heaving and straining to price an itinerary while at their competitors easyJet, who are less reliant on legacy tech stacks, the site is smooth and efficient.
As a result airlines are not really able to truly understand how people using their sites really feel and what they actually see. Forrester Research, an agency, reckon that best-in-class brands need to achieve 17 emotionally positive experiences for every negative one. Dodgy brands might have only one or two.
Just like how a Goshawk with laser-precise vision will catch more prey, an airline creating a good experience at the hunting/retailing stage will perform better commercially. Airlines can learn from other industries to find out more about how to create emotional connection by doing two things.
First is eye-tracking to get insights into valuable consumer behaviour. Supermarkets use special headsets to see where people’s eyes are looking as they walk past the shelves. Unsurprisingly, the eye-level shelf is the top performer. Airlines selling in virtual reality (see article) might be able to achieve the same.
Eye tracking can ensure accuracy and scalability in consumer research. Eye movements are mapped via technology like eye gazing heat maps to identify customer preferences accordingly.
The second emotional gauge airlines can use is reading facial emotions of consumers. This can be achieved by offering people an incentive to turn on their devices’ cameras, when they buy using a VR headset or as they travel through the airport with special AI-cameras that can figure out what emotions people are feeling as they pass by.
Montreal-based CubeGO, sometimes overflown by Northern Goshawks, is one of the companies specialising in this space. Their remote user-testing platform enables eye tracking and facial emotions and is powered by deep learning (AI). They have helped banks improve the mortgage application process for customers and shown universities how to make it easier for prospective undergrads and postgrads to apply for programmes.
There are many areas where emotional analytics will generate insights for airlines. Examples include:
1. Is their artwork, banners & promo prices engaging or off-putting?
2. Which offers draw the most attention & which convert the most easily?
3. To what extent do buyers understand the information seen when travel shopping?
4. Are payment gateways triggering conversion or friction?
5. Can the shopping sequence be better aligned by the buyer’s thought process?
Remote user-testing software is permission based. It requires the consumer to be part of the process by granting permission to activate the camera, just like Zoom and the other video calling platforms.
This may be challenging to implement at scale and buyers will require an incentive like lower prices or more loyalty points to be monitored. But business in general is finding volunteers to train AI models, so airlines can too. The technology is proven and promises to deliver better experiences for airline retailing.
Emotional marketing is not always easy. It changes with moods and impressions (see article) and is not rational. But the emotional connections airlines develop as part of their marketing effort are strong, resilient, and engaging. The product is charismatic too – whizzing through the air 15x more quickly than a Goshawk is desirable.
Each interaction and experience airlines have with their buyers is part of an evolving and ongoing relationship that can be improved with smart technology.
Like the Northern Goshawk, airlines can use better eyesight to avoid blind spots, turn sharply and dodge obstacles. Being more raptor will help airlines in their pursuit to identify demand and win the hunt for market share.
Stay tuned for the next part of this article where I highlight specific emotional analytics cases for airline retailing.
ricardo DOT pilon AT millavia DOT com (author)
oliver AT ransonpricing DOT com (editor)