After-COVID
Airline Service Model
Business Design, Service Design, Workshop Facilitation
Customer expectations shifted as a result of COVID-19. To relaunch a service model that met their needs and motivated them to travel again, an airline needed to align departments in the same direction.
Company: All Nippon Airways -the largest airline in Japan with 75 international routes
Goal: Align and prioritize each department's strategies, and create a new service model for customers to meet their changing needs as a result of COVID-19.
Solution: Conduct a multidisciplinary workshop to brainstorm and align solutions, align the digital development schedule with the DX department, and create an internal video to show C-Suites the future status of the new service.
Role: Customer Experience Strategist, Facilitator
Result: The program got off to a strong start thanks to the C-suite executives' enthusiastic support. Frontline staff watched an internal video to help them understand what the new service looks like. Many projects are currently underway, and several have gone public.
How might an airline understand changing customer needs with COVID-19 and innovate a new service model in an interdisciplinary organization to motivate customers to fly?
Reflection
User research tells us a lot, even short research.
We decided not to go through the design thinking process due to a lack of time. Compliance requirements also made it difficult for us to communicate with customers. As a result, I think we missed many great insights throughout the process. Customers unintentionally change their needs and can point us in the right direction. I would conduct quick user research to understand customers more and reflect insights on the project.
Do we really know about customers?
We believe that we know about customers, and we are customers since we use our service, too. But I think we don't understand the broader range of customers. Unfortunately, we made decisions based not on human-centered design for this project but on what we knew. We need new learnings and insights from customers all the time. As a design method master, I would lead the project with a human-centered approach and prioritize customers over this project to follow customer mind changes and create better services with them.
