How Travel Brands Can Turn Quiet Critics Into Loyal Champions
Discover ways travel companies can leverage data to boost customer loyalty.
Digital doesn’t just influence travel; it dominates. But many travelers abandon a website or app without a word when things go wrong online. Darren Kennedy, SVP customer experience of Fullstory, discusses how new advances in data capture and ML advances allow brands to surface and address these silent struggles before they cost millions.
When it comes to complaining, travel stands in a class apart. Lost luggage, unruly behavior, additional fees, and flight diversions are common grievances:
- “Sitting on a plane. A lady is angry. Lady pulls the emergency inflatable slide to escape the plane. Lady is running wild through the tarmac currently. Cops have arrived. Flight ruined. Memories made.”
- “6 months since they lost my luggage. I’ve been trying to get compensation for my bag back, went to the front desk, sent multiple emails, no answer from their end.”
- “Newark to Rome was delayed 6 times. Are you really still cleaning the plane after 4 hours? And now suddenly there is a mechanical issue? Please spare me the lies.”
However, new research from FullStory shows that while the loudest voices tend to get the most attention, travelers who aren’t as vocal about their concerns are costing travel brands more than they realize.
Digital research and booking dominate travel. Nearly 8 in 10 (78%) Americans always or frequently research and book at least some portion of their trips online. This is especially true for more affluent travelers, nearly half of whom (49%) research and book all of their travel online.
But when things go wrong in the crucial digital channel, travel companies are often the last to know. According to FullStory’s recent global study, 51% of Americans simply won’t share their digital experience feedback, even if they’ve had a terrible experience. That’s despite 21% frequently struggling with travel sites and apps online – and a comparable number describing the digital travel experience as “stressful” or “difficult.”
These “Quiet Critics” won’t fill in a survey or share direct feedback, but they could seriously impact your business’s bottom line. With so much competition, these consumers will simply close the browser, uninstall the app, and look for an alternative.
Brand loyalty matters, but it’s not guaranteed. Providing customers with a seamless digital experience is as important to keep your customers as a smooth flight or a memorable hotel stay. More than half of respondents (53%) are unlikely to return to a business that provides a poor digital experience, and only 5% say they are “very likely” to give a brand a second chance after a bad online experience.
This poses a major problem for travel brands who want to improve their digital experience (DX), deliver great customer support, and maintain a loyal customer base. How can you improve if you don’t know what you are doing wrong? Making crucial customer experience decisions based on guesswork—rather than data—directly impacts your bottom line.
See More: 3 Ways Brands Benefit From Digital Customer Experience Analytics
Fixing the Unknowns in the Digital Travel Experience
Digital Experience Intelligence (DXI), also known as digital experience analytics, allows you to uncover signals of frustration and opportunities for improvement – the key to understanding even the quietest of customers. DXI platforms capture and organize first-party user data, using advanced AI and ML to uncover actionable insights to empathize with customer needs and frustrations.
Through applications like operational session replay, heatmaps, and customer journey mapping, DXI makes it possible to truly understand and empathize with all customers, including those who don’t share their feedback.
Brands like JetBlue and Flight Centre are at the forefront of identifying and responding to digital frustration signals like dead clicks, rage clicks, thrashed cursors, and pinch-to-zoom. These cues provide a digital trail of the frustrations and experiences of otherwise silent customers and can reveal revenue-impacting opportunities that wouldn’t be discoverable otherwise.
- JetBlue reduced payment errors by 20% by regularly checking spikes in rage, dead, error clicks, or any other unusual trends.
- Flight Centre achieved a 22% decrease in its booking fail rate by recreating exactly what the errors looked like through the users’ eyes, pinpointing that it was happening at the API level and collaborating with engineering teams to correct the issue.
- Endeavour Group increased add-to-carts by 13% and decreased “rage clicks” by 23% by understanding what was happening and why through DXI.
Complete Data Is Key
Without knowing what each individual’s digital travel experience is actually like, brands don’t know how to engage, convert, and retain travelers. And the only way to create a complete, accurate picture is to automatically capture all data signals on your digital properties – not just the things you know you want to track up front.
This includes not only core events such as booking value or conversion but the long tail of all engagements that occur between your site or app and customers: scrolling, clicks, highlights, rage clicks, form errors, frustrating navigation loops, and more. These hold an untold quantity of user intent and interaction insights and are where Quiet Critics often reside.
With auto-capture, you don’t need to know everything you want to track up front. Because all customer interactions are logged, the qualitative data surrounding digital issues is available and actionable at any point, even if you didn’t originally assume you’d need it. Autocapture harnesses them all and reveals trends over time, helping travel brands understand the “unknown unknowns” and address issues their customers don’t tell them about.
Session replay that’s fueled by auto-capture helps travel brands look beyond what users are doing and understand why. For example, quantitative metrics might reveal that a significant percentage of users are dropping out of a booking flow after the second step. No errors are being triggered—so what’s happening? Analyzing relevant sessions through session replay, it’s discovered that a pop-up was blocking the button that enables the user to move to the next step in the flow – an easy and high-impact fix.
For example, before implementing DXI, Travel + Leisure Co.’s customer-facing teams responded to issues reported by customers—essentially one at a time. With DX analytics and auto-capture, when a problem is identified internally, the team is able to view the issue with Session Replay, identify the root cause, and fix it before it becomes a widespread issue. Over time, this has enabled their teams to provide proactive customer support and solve problems before customers experience and report them.
Focus On Function
It doesn’t take buzzy features like AR tours or AI-generated review summaries to turn Quiet Critics into champions. These travelers simply want to quickly accomplish what they came to do, and most prefer practical improvements over flashy additions. Nearly a quarter (23%) of travelers would like to see enhancements to interfaces and navigation improvements, and 17% are interested in improved stability and reliability.
By using technologies like DXI and auto-capture to ensure that the digital experience works as well as possible for everyone, travel brands can give even the most critical customers a reason to stay and a reason to come back again and again.
What are other benefits for which brand can leverage digital analytics? Share with us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. We’d love to hear from you!
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