The Onboard Portal as a gateway to new customer experience

Abstract

WIFI is everywhere, from cafes to bus stops, trains to airports, it’s a service that people consider as necessity. Ten years ago, air space was the only WiFi-wasteland. Nowadays, it’s safe to say that WiFi on planes is very common now. AirFrance-KLM also implements the WIFI service on the plane. It creates a new customer touchpoint within the customer journey — the Onboard Portal. Passengers use this website to connect the WIFI with their own devices on the plane. The goal of the project is to explore the possibilities of improving customer experience via this touchpoint by providing possible ancillaries (commission-based products /services, travel-related information, etc.). This project proposes a new conceptual OBP including a set of ancillaries based on passengers’ personalities (big five personality model, Goldberg, 1990). The concept enables the target group to arrange their trips better with immediate transportation guidance or long-term travel plan. As Figure 1 shows, the project started with analyzing the brand value/business strategy of KLM. The result showed KLM wants to provide a memorable experience to its customers and enhance customer intimacy. Personalization and customization is the current focus, since they are good methods of enhancing customer intimacy. Then, an investigation of current OBP and its competitors were conducted. It shows the current OBP only provide limited ancillaries, and do not recognize the passenger. The usage rate of KLM’s OBP is low. By analyzing the previous market research results, the in-flight and post-flight experience of travelers with business and personal purpose ware chosen as a starting point to explore how to provide personalized services and enhance user experience. Multiple research methods including contextmapping, interview and online questionnaire survey were used to create their customer profiles and passenger journeys. Based on previous research results, eight intervention opportunities were identified as potential areas to create design interventions. Due to the constraints of time and access to the business travelers, the target group was narrowed down to the tourists. The theory of the big five model and personality traits was introduced for personalized services. Then, literature review and statements analysis were conducted to explore passengers’ needs, concerns, and expectations with different personalities. The results were using to generate primary concepts in creative sessions. All these concepts were tested to gain more insights. Meanwhile, a brainstorm session and an online questionnaire survey were conducted to discover more ancillaries. After comparing all results, one concept was chosen to continue as the final design direction, and the profiles of the target group based on the chosen personality trait(conscientiousness) were created. Accordingly, the final concept was developed after some iterations (concept evaluation with coaches and customers). In the last phase, the design concept was evaluated with customers and experts from KLM to get critical feedback and suggestions, from customer’s and company’s perspective. The recommendations and limitations were discussed as well in the end.