The difference between a seamless customer journey and a frustrating one hinges on the effective use of real-time data powering AI systems. Customers find few things more frustrating than encountering disruptions during their travels. Delays and perceived indifference can sour their experience with your airline. The good news is, you have the tools to prevent these issues.
The most modern and efficient approach to delivering a superior customer experience is through the strategic use of real-time data and AI. This technology ensures that your airline consistently prioritizes safety, convenience, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Here’s how.
What are Airline Customers Seeking in a Journey?
The first step towards delivering an exceptional journey is to understand what customers seek. So what is it?
Timeliness: Customers dislike disruptions — and therefore, delays. By leveraging a real-time data integration and streaming platform like Striim, your team can monitor flight operations in real time. This allows you to optimize flight schedules and promptly address issues, ensuring customers reach their destinations on schedule.
Convenience: Convenience is a hallmark of a seamless journey. Using a data integration platform that provides your airline with insights to streamline processes enables more efficient check-ins, faster boarding, and stress-free connections. This positions your airline as the best option for hassle-free travel.
Customer Service: Excellent customer service significantly contributes to customer satisfaction. Customers expect helpful, friendly interactions with team members at every touchpoint. A data integration and streaming solution equips your staff with real-time information about customers’ preferences and needs, guaranteeing a cohesive and personalized experience throughout the journey.
Safety: Customers need to feel they are traveling in a safe, well-maintained aircraft. Predictive maintenance, powered by data integration and streaming, plays a crucial role in ensuring safety. Your team can utilize predictive analytics to gain insights into when equipment is likely to fail, enabling proactive maintenance and mitigating the risk of unexpected issues.
By prioritizing these key areas—timeliness, convenience, customer service, and safety—your airline will deliver a satisfying experience.
Why Use AI + Real-Time Data for Seamless Customer Experiences?
According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the primary cause of flight delays is the late arrival of the previous aircraft. This underscores the critical need for timely operations in the airline industry. Artificial intelligence systems, fueled by real-time data, can help.
Moreover, AI and real-time data not only empower airlines to maintain timeliness but also provide the essential information needed for a cohesive and delightful customer experience, ensuring customers arrive at their destinations on time and safely. Let’s dive deeper into how this occurs.
How do AI and Real-Time Data Create Excellent Customer Journeys?
Real-time data and AI collaborate to elevate the customer journey by providing airlines with up-to-the-second insights, essential for creating seamless customer experiences.
These instantaneous insights are driven by real-time data streaming and integration, a stark departure from batch processing. While batch processing offers insights just once a day, often leading to outdated information, stream processing continually gathers, processes, and analyzes data in real time, ensuring minimal latency.
The way that it works is that Striim connects directly to diverse data sources across the airline ecosystem, such as flight schedules, booking systems, and operational data. It continuously processes these streams in real time, extracting and transforming data on-the-fly to ensure it’s immediately available for AI analysis.
This seamless integration empowered by Striim enables AI systems to receive up-to-the-second insights, allowing airlines to make informed decisions swiftly. For instance, AI algorithms can predict flight delays, optimize crew assignments, or personalize customer services based on current data. By avoiding batch processing delays and leveraging continuous data streams, Striim empowers airlines to deliver superior customer experiences through agile and data-driven operations.
Here’s what that looks like in practice — and how it contributes to a more convenient, seamless experience.
Predictive Maintenance to Enhance Safety
AI systems harness real-time data to provide personalized and proactive solutions. By deploying machine learning algorithms, airlines can sift through vast data volumes, identifying patterns and foreseeing potential issues like mechanical failures or delays.
For example, predictive maintenance algorithms scrutinize data from aircraft sensors, detecting anomalies and forecasting when components might fail, enabling preemptive maintenance actions. This not only helps airlines prevent delays but also ensures customer safety by averting the use of aircraft needing urgent maintenance.
Dynamic Scheduling to Streamline Operations
Dynamic scheduling, facilitated by AI and real-time data analysis, revolutionizes airline operations by continuously optimizing flight schedules based on current conditions. AI algorithms ingest and analyze real-time data streams from various sources such as flight operations systems, weather forecasts, and air traffic control. These algorithms utilize machine learning models to identify patterns and trends, allowing airlines to predict potential disruptions like weather events or congested airspaces.
By processing this data in real time, AI can dynamically adjust flight schedules to minimize delays and enhance operational efficiency. Consider this: If adverse weather conditions are detected along a planned route, AI algorithms can recommend alternative flight paths or schedule adjustments to avoid delays. This proactive approach not only improves on-time performance but also optimizes fuel consumption and reduces operational costs.
Personalized Customer Services to Boost Customer Experience
Investing in customer service is never a mistake — and AI systems fueled by real-time data enable you to effectively do so. AI-driven recommendation systems leverage real-time customer data to offer personalized services, including tailored seat and meal preferences. AI-powered chatbots deliver immediate customer support, while natural language processing (NLP) algorithms analyze customer inquiries promptly and effectively. The integration of these AI technologies into your airline’s operations ensures a seamless, responsive, and safe travel experience for all customers.
As a result, customers enjoy a seamless and convenient journey that fosters positive perceptions of your airline. Leveraging Striim’s real-time data integration and streaming capabilities allows your airline to consistently deliver timely, personalized services that enhance customer satisfaction. This technological edge ensures that every interaction is optimized with the latest insights, reinforcing a reputation for customer-centricity in the highly competitive airline industry.
American Airlines Uses Real-Time Data to Supercharge Customer Journeys
Want to see Striim’s impact in action? Consider how American Airlines has harnessed Striim’s real-time data capabilities to significantly enhance operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
With a vast operational scope encompassing over 5,800 daily flights to more than 350 destinations worldwide, American Airlines relies on continuous data streaming to manage flight operations seamlessly.
Striim plays a pivotal role in enabling American Airlines’ TechOps team to monitor aircraft telemetry in real time and make data-driven decisions. By integrating Striim with Microsoft Azure and Databricks, American Airlines has streamlined their data processing pipeline, allowing for rapid ingestion, processing, and analysis of operational data. This capability empowers TechOps to proactively manage flight schedules, respond swiftly to maintenance needs, and optimize resource allocation across their global network.
Through the seamless integration of Striim, American Airlines has achieved operational excellence, ensuring flights depart and arrive punctually while maintaining high standards of safety and reliability. This real-time data processing capability not only supports day-to-day operations but also enhances the overall customer experience by minimizing delays and disruptions.
Additionally, Striim’s partnership with Wizz Air is transforming operations through real-time data. This collaboration has significantly expedited Wizz Air’s data modernization initiative by migrating their data to Microsoft Azure, enabling real-time analytics within Azure Synapse.
As a result, Wizz Air can harness insights that streamline operations and enhance the customer experience. This includes providing real-time flight status updates for accurate information to passengers and proactive rebooking assistance in case of unavoidable cancellations.
Utilize Real-Time Data to Empower AI Systems that Enhance Seamless Journeys
By putting real-time data to work to empower AI systems that enable your airline to offer a seamless customer experience, you’ll see the difference that data can make. Give Striim a try today with a free trial to see for yourself how real-time data can uplevel your organization.
