Customer Engagement: Ideas for Airlines to Improve Customer Engagement

The airline industry has been notoriously infamous about the poor customer experience and engagement. This has also played a big part on the overall profitability of the industry. The only airlines that are making profits are the one’s that have some semblance of good customer experience going.

If you take flights for work on a regular basis, you will agree that we spend enormous amounts of time reaching the airport, at the airport (both at the destination & the origin), on-board the aircraft and the drive away from the airports. So, I thought what could the airlines do to help us remain productive or engaged through the entire journey and below are some of the ideas that i could think of:

1. Make available indoor games within the aircraft (games like crossword, Sudoku, playing cards, puzzles, lego blocks, chess, Chinese checkers, etc).
2. In longer flights, run an impromptu crossword or sudoku competition. Give the winners a small token of appreciation.
3. Play dumb charades on-board.
4. Create a short story competition for passengers flying on a flight. Announce the theme for the short story post take off. Passengers need to write these stories on board the flight and submit before the flight lands.
5. Make all these stories available for download for free.
6. Hire an editor and select the top 100 short stories and publish them as a book. Give the book away to all passengers flying on a specific day on your airline.
7. Use the “Best Journey Ever” and “Worst journey Ever” themes for the short story contest. This will tell you what passengers value while travelling and what they hate. Reduce/eliminate what they hate and increase and enhance what they love.
8. At peak times, provide a newspapers or magazines to passengers in queue (at the check-in counter) which they can drop at the counter while collecting their boarding pass.
9. Put a game of sudoku or crossword or an interesting quote at the back of the boarding pass.
10. Publicly share the names of the people who are travelling on the same flight (with passenger permission, also share whatever they are willing to share, company, role, etc). This would provide passengers to connect and network instead of just pass time.
11. Run a contest inviting passengers to shoot themselves making the safety announcement and submit on YouTube. Pick top videos and reward them. Use some of the ideas on board and also announce the name of the passenger who submitted that idea.
12. Provide 2 stickers (smiley and sad face) during boarding. Request the customers to stick the smiley based on their experience on-board the aircraft.

These are some ideas that i think can be implemented with not much expense and at the same time will dramatically improve the customer engagement on-board the aircraft.

Can you think of some ideas that airlines could use to improve their customer engagement? Please share them here as well. Maybe, some airline might use some of these ideas and our travel experience better.