The Service Recovery Experience

The Service Recovery Experience

Offenberg, E.W.B.

de Lille, C.S.H. (mentor)
Pasman, G.J. (mentor)
van Opbergen, L. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design / Design Conceptualisation & Communication (DCC)

Design for Interaction

2016-10-31

Financial pressures in the airline industry have forced KLM to change their strategic direction. Using the Treacy & Wiersema (1993) model KLM’s new focus is on customer intimacy. This implies researching customer needs and designing from a user-centered perspective. Which are fueled by the change in the consumer landscape, namely digital darwinism and demand for contextualization. Looking at the digital content send along a customer’s journey and how to contextualize this is the starting point of this thesis. An extensive customer, trend and company analysis (including context mapping and interviews at the x-gates) led to four areas of interest. Mainly reassurance and stress relief is sought in situations where white wingers experience that digital content isn’t sufficient. Each channel distributes content in a different manner, causing confusion for the passenger instead of creating an omnichannel-like experience. In general, the need for content differs throughout the phases of the customer journey, but still can be regarded as satisfactory until a flight schedule is disrupted. During disruptions most passengers experience more stress and seek guidance. The research highlighted disruptions as an area of interest where KLM can offer more content fitting to a passenger’s situation. Disruptions happen quite frequently in the airline industry, and come across in all sizes and variations. A disruption can be seen as anything that alters the planning of a passenger, this can for instance be a seat change or a cancellation of the entire aircraft. Unfortunately, lots of causes for disruptions are out of KLM’s control (e.g. weather conditions), meaning that disruptions will always occur. Keeping customer intimacy in mind, disruptions are highly relatable to customer satisfaction (NPS) and are the cause for most complaints. Each change in flight schedule is subjective; for some passengers a disruption can have great impact on their travels, while for others it does not bother them that much. This makes it highly appropriate for contextualization of content. Currently, the handling of disruptions resulted in generic push notifications as the only form of communication towards a passenger. Often leaving passengers stressed, confused and unsatisfied. De Matos, Rossi and Henrique (2007) discussed the service recovery paradox, suggesting that it is normal that customer satisfaction decreases when a disruption is experienced, but can be increased (even above the default-level) if the appropriate service recovery is in place. According to Kau and Loh (2006) customer satisfaction can be increased with a service recovery if the service is perceived as just. This correlation suggests a focus on interactional, distributive and procedural justice. Therefore, the analysis and more in depth focus on disruption handling ends, but introduces the ideation phase in which solutions for these problems are sought. Using brainwriting in groups and a future workshop as co-creation techniques resulted in a storyboard of a desired situation. Eventually forming the new service recovery experience; Care+. Care+ uses a conversational UI to communicate with a passenger and helps the passenger with any type of disruption he is coping with. Creating this cross-channel point of reference allows the passenger to have one conversation with KLM, forming a seamless omnichannel experience on which the desired content is received. Next to informing the passenger, extra features are offered as a form of compensation. For this content to adapt and be tailored to the moment the passenger is experiencing a lot of data needs processing. This data is needed to identify the passenger and its moment. Here lots of backend bottlenecks are encountered, and different enablers are needed for each moment. Only with these enablers in place can a good service recovery be delivered for different disruptions. This thesis contains a design proposal (namely Care+) as just described, but also focusses on the steps that KLM needs to undertake at the backend. Suggesting a Care+ API to connect and recognize different data patterns. The feasibility of these enablers are discussed in the implementation plan. Using a high-level digital wireframe, a simulation of Care+ was tested with participants at the X-gates. It showed high user acceptance and potential, but the real challenges still remain at the functionality. If Care+ can provide solutions with real-time data as quickly as the simulation, a great gap regarding customer satisfaction can be filled. This thesis has hopefully drawn KLM’s attention enough towards the bottleneck that is disruptions, and have encouraged them on building certain enablers.

Disruptions
Service Recovery
KLM
Contextual
Omnichannel
Conversational UI

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:9717ba29-f724-4b02-8691-bb0ff3ee7aad

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Offenberg, E.W.B.