- What are some key challenges airlines face without experience management or AI analytics providers?
Airlines operate in a dynamic, high-stakes environment, with evolving consumer expectations, intense operational demands, and abundant choice for travelers. The industry is constantly under pressure.
Qualtrics research shows that globally, 12% of brand interactions fail to meet customer expectations. This matters because 53% of consumers say they will cut spending after a bad experience. The top pain points cited are service delivery issues (46%), communication problems (45%), employee interactions (39%), and price (37%).
In the competitive airline industry, airlines that can deeply understand customer needs gain a significant advantage. Those that can grasp sentiment, preferences, and friction points are able to engage in ways customers value. This connection cannot be overstated.
- How do you balance automation with the human element in customer experience management?
The key to balancing AI-powered automation and human interaction is leaning into where each delivers the most value. It’s about empowering humans with better data, not replacing them.
For example, AI excels at accelerating and improving insight generation, as well as data processing and analysis. This allows airlines to quickly analyze millions of data points from surveys, social media, call centers, digital channels, and more to build a comprehensive picture of customer sentiment. When employees are equipped with these types of insights, they can deliver the personalized, proactive, and empathetic experiences that define strong brands and lasting customer relationships.
- How does Qualtrics ensure that AI-powered insights remain accurate, unbiased, and culturally relevant across SIA’s diverse global customer base?
AI and AI agents represent a radical transformation in what’s possible in experience management, with new capabilities that allow organizations to build deeper connections with the customers they serve.
Using Qualtrics AI, organizations can quickly capture and analyze feedback to understand the emotion, effort, and intent behind every interaction, and then take rapid, targeted action – across multiple languages. For example, survey questions instantly adapt based on previous answers to help businesses capture higher quality feedback. This shift toward AI is proven to deliver more business impact over traditional approaches: survey completion rates are up 8%, brands get 100% more words per open ended response, and feedback quality improves 200%.
AI-powered analysis in Qualtrics also allows companies to rapidly analyze and act on structured and unstructured location-specific interactions, compare performance to competitors, and quickly uncover insights using natural language processing.
Our approach to AI prioritizes ethics, privacy, and user experience. It is built around a set of principles to provide trustworthy AI capabilities to our customers while protecting data privacy and security.
- How does improved customer experience analytics translate into tangible benefits for an airline’s operations?
Great customer experience translates into measurable value for airlines beyond traditional satisfaction metrics. Firstly, it allows airlines to quickly identify pain points and emerging trends. This means they can proactively fix issues, stopping small problems from becoming big operational headaches. Secondly, these insights help optimize resource deployment. Knowing exactly where customer friction occurs allows for smarter allocation of staff and resources, improving efficiency and even reducing costs.
- Is there an increased demand for AI-driven experience management in the airline industry post-pandemic?
There is a growing demand for using AI to deliver exceptional customer experiences across all industries. In today’s AI-driven world, the companies that succeed are highly agile and customer-centric. AI has become essential for quickly understanding and adapting to evolving customer needs.
- What trends in customer experience should airlines be prioritising over the next few years?
AI agents are a hot topic in the industry, and we can expect airlines to adopt them to build connections that address consumer pain points and drive business success.
Our research shows that two-thirds of travelers expect airlines to remember their preferences and anticipate their needs based on behavioral patterns and the current journey context—not just loyalty status or past purchase history. Passengers also increasingly expect airlines to predict disruptions and address potential issues before they affect the travel experience. Both are areas where AI agents have a fundamental and impactful role to play.
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