Knowing that service disruptions are often out of your brand’s control, and how detrimental they can be to the customer journey, learn how Kobie partnered with Amtrak to implement proactive measures that do more than just mitigate member attrition.
The challenge:
Service failures and interruptions are an inevitable challenge brands face and need to overcome for all customers, especially their most valuable. We know from Kobie’s Research Study that customers experience pain and forgiveness differently depending on their emotional motivators. So, developing scalable and dynamic solutions that address and resolve service issues proactively can be a game changer for customer service and customers alike.
The travel industry must consider the implications of these solutions, where service failures are more common, and for issues often outside of travel provider’s control such as weather or global technology updates.
The solution:
Kobie began to address this challenge in partnership with Amtrak, our national rail travel client, aiming to mitigate the friction caused by rail delays for both loyalty program members and non-member riders. The result was Kobie’s implementation of a Proactive Service Recovery (PaSR) feature, specifically piloted for anyone experiencing a train delay of certain durations on specific routes.
The PaSR pilot’s initial goal was to improve customer satisfaction by offering rewards points to riders. Whether through perceived value of the points themselves, or simply the value of recognizing an individual’s travel hardship, it also drove a secondary goal of new program enrollments.
The pilot was designed to meet prioritized use cases that targeted high-value rider routes while also monitoring and controlling financial liability. The solution enabled communication to members, leveraging the brand’s ecosystem and Kobie Alchemy® Loyalty Cloud technology, to notify riders of their automatically awarded loyalty points in their account during a delay, and offered an alternative prompt to non-members to enroll to receive their goodwill points. When the delay “event” is identified, emails are deployed to travelers that acknowledge the delay and encourage the submission to request compensation. The emails include a large a header with clear messaging: “Here’s 2,000 points.” This makes it easy for recipients to identify the proactive outreach and read further to either claim their points or enroll to do so.
While the initial pilot was a success, reaching thousands of members and garnering hundreds of new program enrollments in the first few months, the feature was also built to offer expanded optionality for travelers to receive other compensations outside of points.
We expanded optionality by enabling coupons, which has since further boosted KPI metrics, and continue to extend other benefits that resonate through difference scenarios and customer segments.
We began collecting additional data points to track riders’ likelihood to rebook after receiving PaSR communications and compensation, further proving the success of the solution and informing innovative recommendations for future enhancements, such as scaling PaSR campaign relevancy, lead time and segmentation.
The outcomes:
As a result of the continued evolution of the PaSR feature, nearly every member who received a PaSR offer made an additional booking after. From an ROI perspective, that second-trip revenue equates to millions in revenue saved through the PaSR initiative, providing significant value to both members and the brand alike.
Proactivity and transparency go a long way with travel members today, so if your brand is not considering how this plays a role in your loyalty strategy, reach out to Kobie for help today.
