CUSTOMER STORY
British Airways Holidays
Improving passenger communications for holiday provider British Airways Holidays
About British Airways Holidays
As one of the UK’s leading holiday providers, they pride themselves on delivering exceptional customer experiences. A pledge which is reaffirmed by 95% of customers saying they’d book with them again.
The challenge
A new approach was needed to send out “disruption texts”. Disruption texts being messages sent to customers to notify them of circumstances such as cancelled flights, quarantine requirements etc.
They had been previously using a simple text message service, but this presented a number of challenges and limitations:
- Links to mobile web pages, where more detailed information could be supplied to customers, were not available from their previous supplier.
- Only text could be supplied to customers, which meant British Airways were unable to maintain brand consistency and missed an opportunity to build trust.
- Longer, more detailed messages could not be sent to customers en masse without incurring costs for additional messages.
What were British Airways Holidays’ requirements?
- A service that engaged with customers in a fast and efficient manner.
- Any new solution should help to increase brand exposure to customers.
- The new solution should allow for the supply of more information to customers. Previous simple SMS disruption texts were limited.
- A faster and more efficient way to opt customers in to receive these communications.
- The new solution needed to be able to better manage customer responses.
- Had to handle customers’ data in a safe and secure way
- Needed to be easy to use.
- The performance of each message needed to be tracked.
- And ultimately, make the customer journey clearer and easier.
How were British Airways Holidays challenges solved?
After consulting with Esendex, British Airways Holidays implemented an SMS Landing Page solution for their future disruption message strategy. The way it works is simple.
Using the Messaging Studio platform, British Airways Holidays were able to easily design a new range of messages which were branded (increasing brand awareness/customer trust), and data-rich (I.e. the ability to add more content than in a simple SMS).
Customers can also select web links from messages, and carry out other follow-on actions via interactive buttons such as requesting call-backs.
Customers are able to navigate to the SMS Landing Page by first of all being supplied with a personalised SMS text message. This message contains a web link, which when selected, would take the customer to their personalised landing page, where they can simply read the notification or perform another action.
British Airways Holidays are also able to solve some of their administration issues via this system as Messaging Studio allows for the simple upload of mass contacts, and campaign reporting.
What results have British Airways Holidays seen?
- Since implementing the SMS Landing Pages/Messaging Studio solution British Airways Holidays have seen a significant engagement increase to 59% compared with 44% via the previous simple SMS based system.
- Using the SMS Landing Page solution has resulted in faster turnaround responses for customers, with the added benefit of using fewer resources.
- Having access to detailed reports (which contain each customer’s name, number, booking reference) has made it much easier for British Airways Holidays to manage the program.
“Using the SMS Landing Page product has allowed us to engage better with our customers. Using branding on our texts, and the excellently branded landing pages has given us better tools to give the right message and information to our customers.
We can now confidently message our customers, helping us cement our brand as the trustworthy business we want to promote”
Magdalene Palling – Customer Operations Manager – British Airways Holidays
