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Introduction
Because of my experience working in customer experience consulting, I chose to focus my master's thesis on an little-studied area of customer experience: the customer-employee interaction and how it may be personalized through technology and big data.
Making an idea web of product concepts!
Opportunity Space
High-touch service providers, such as financial advisers and stylists, learn about individual customers during face-to-face encounters. They use what they learn to deliver highly personalized service, which their clients pay a premium for.
Online services, such as Amazon.com and Netflix, monitor users' interactions with in order to personalize recommendations and other service offerings. Users might choose a service provider because of the personal content, but they usually will not pay more for the products or services because of it.
Many brick and mortar service providers such as hotels and retail stores operate loyalty programs which track customer actions and provide discounts as a way of generating loyal patronage. Interestingly, they rarely if ever use the data collected on individual customers to personalize face-to-face service encounters.
There’s an opportunity for companies to personalize the service of customers who are already providing data to the company via the loyalty program.
Target User Group
I’m investigating the air travel industry, focusing on business travelers in the lower tiers of the airline frequent flyer programs, for a few reasons:
Airlines are known for having the most sophisticated loyalty programs[1]. These loyalty programs can be a source of customer data. Nonetheless, many customers find the air travel experience to be far below expectations.
There is a financial incentive to improve this customer group’s experience. Lower-tier frequent travellers matter to airlines because they are valuable customers, but are at risk of defecting because they don’t receive the elite perks that top-tier customers do.
My findings will be applicable to other industries and contexts. Last year, I studied customer-employee interaction in retail and food service contexts as part of an independent study, and those findings have guided me during this research.
[1] American Airlines is widely credited as creating the first loyalty program in the early 1980s. Additionally, airlines have continually found ways to provide rewards to customers that go beyond “giving them free stuff.” For instance, airlines were able to commoditize boarding the plane first, which is something of value to customers, but which doesn’t cost the airline in resources to provide.
I created a customer journey map based off my interviewees' routines. I decided to focus on the in-airport experience. It's useful to model the current interaction experience before moving into the design phase.
