English | EN Going Digital: Gamifying Frequent Flyer programs
Jul 9, 2015
Let’s apply some digital wonder potion to one of the cornerstones of modern air travel: Frequent flyer programs. They have been around since the 1980s, but the concept is under pressure. How do you make everybody feel special? How do you strategically reward the people who are going to give you the most business down the line, without disappointing others? What would a truly digital frequent flyer program look like? How do you really engage frequent flyers in an age where personalization, context and interactivity are everywhere? Some loose ideas…
Personalize: No more Platinum, Gold or Silver
Tiers, based on a fixed number of points or flights are a hassle. Every time you change the requirements for the levels –which will always happen because economics change- without fail you disappoint a section of your loyal customers. Instead, with today’s technology, there could be some kind of open-ended continuum. A scale where there is always an incremental benefit to making just one extra flight. And the more you fly, the more benefits or miles will get ‘vested’, or something similar.
We can now super-personalize everything. Why not also change the communication to be individual rather than simply based on tiers? We can even tell people that they are in the ‘top 25% of people who joined around the same time’ or made the ‘top 10% of people from their company’, the ‘top 5% of people who live in the same city’ etc. You can come up with many ways to make lots of people a winner. More importantly: One extra flight removed from becoming a winner too!more–>
Interactivity: The game of flying
Second element in Frequent Flyer programs is the improved flight experience that ‘silver’, ‘gold’ or ‘platinum’ promise. In reality, this is often a fairly thin benefit. There are overcrowded lounges and many flights on which practically everybody gets to board through the ‘priority’ lane. Again: Why not individualize? For example, make selecting seats more of a competitive game, based on a combination of price paid for a ticket and ranking of travellers based on your frequent flyer points. On some flights you may ‘outbid’ pretty much everybody and end up first class, on other flights you may discover that you end up on your regular chair. Same for access to the lounge: by making access a bit less certain – basing it on how many others are there – the subjective experience will probably improve once you do get in. Boarding time? Think like an auction clock: when your individual boarding number is up, you can board!
But, more importantly, and what’s missing today, is a much more transparent insight into how you rank, where you stand and… what you could do to improve your standing: “If you make just two more flights, you would open up these extra seats to choose from”. Also: instead of fixed classes, planes could have a kind of heat-map with much more gradual pricing for more popular seats. Seatguru-style, but even more detailed. And if you want to gamify even further, you could allow buying and selling of seating options to make the ‘market’ even more flexible.
And all of this is supported by a nice, simple, interactive app, of course, to prevent showing up at the lounge and being denied access in person… because that would not make the traveller feel good.
Earning and spending your ‘miles’
Perhaps we can even do away with the concept of ‘miles’ altogether and simply offer discounts on regular fares based on your ranking. Higher in the ranking, more discount. Add some specials, coupons, time-limited options and many other game-like elements and see what you can do. Make things more flexible, not to extract more money, but to add excitement and enjoyment for the customer. And perhaps in the process, gain new insights through the collected data.
Reinventing customer engagement
Granted, there will be numerous complexities to sort out. Yet, in the end, a reinvented program will invigorate frequent flyer programs, I’m sure. Keeping the customer central is absolutely essential, and that may be a first challenge for an industry where transparency and flexibility towards the customer seem to have been made difficult on purpose (really? A single ticket is still sometimes more expensive than an entire return trip? Changing a ticket costs more than the entire ticket?). And I realize it’s hard to change these things in an established business: creating super-personalized information services is great to help provide better customer service but of course this is only possible if the back operations are just as agile. Still, once you redefine from the ground up, revolutionary concepts can bring what the programs once aimed to bring: happy, loyal customers in the clouds! Who dares to go first?
Other ideas? Want to discuss? Feel free to drop a comment or give me a call to discuss!
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