How well do you know your top tier travelers?

By Paul Albert, Director of Travel, Vision Critical

You know Tim flies 250,000 miles per year, he likes the aisle seat, always flies business class, prefers a non-smoking queen bedroom and rents a luxury car with GPS. But, what do you really know about your top tier travelers like Tim, beyond what they purchase?

What’s missing from loyalty programs
In a competitive marketplace with rising costs and an ever-increasing expectation of low rates, it becomes vitally important to know what will keep your top tier customers returning to do business with you. Loyalty programs are a step in the right direction to collect customer information and enable more effective communication. The challenge is creating a meaningful relationship when all you really know from the loyalty program is the customer’s name, contact information and transactional data.

But how do you gain that insight? Travel companies are trying to be proactive in gathering additional information by creating a 1-800 phone number or a dedicated email address for tips and ideas. Some FFP departments find it useful to monitor online websites, blogs and discussion forums to gather feedback. But these options can be time consuming and challenging to integrate with loyalty programs. What’s more is you can’t be sure you’re hearing the voice of customer you should be listening to – your top tier customer.

Gaining the voice of your top tier customers
One solution the travel industry is embracing to build relationships with their best customers is creating a travelers advisory panel. The panel is a dedicated group of loyalty members invited to participate in a company’s ongoing research online. It can be a group of a few hundred to a few hundred thousand and you can talk to them as often as you’d like. It enables organizations to collect valuable insight with online polls, surveys, and communities all in one web-based system.

Uses of a travelers advisory panel
Companies with loyalty programs who are using an advisory panel are gaining insights into customer satisfaction, attitude and usage and ad concept testing. Instead of flying out a small group once a quarter for dinner so you can ask them about their experiences with your brand, wouldn’t you like to gather these results once a month without leaving your desk? It’s also an ideal set-up for effective segmented marketing. With this approach you can identify your top tier loyalty members, learn what matters to them, respond to their feedback through marketing campaigns and see the results in sales from your loyalty program transactional data.

One major international airline used a travelers advisory panel to test an ad campaign. The online testing allowed the company to halt a brand campaign prior to the air date. Using the advisory panel was critical in learning the ads would significantly impact their brand perceptions. The result was a new campaign that was the most successful one this airline had ever experienced with more than 90% recall.

With the speed and efficiency of an advisory panel, companies are finding they gather three times the amount of research than compared to traditional methods. Instead of waiting weeks for a binder of research, you can watch results in real time, much like the way emails flood your inbox. An advisory panel will store all answers ever collected so you don’t have to keep asking where they live, how often they fly and if they like your lounges. This will go a long way in building a strong relationship with your most important customers.

Companies with loyalty programs who are complementing their systems with a travelers advisory panel are learning not only what their top tier customer buys but why. You would know that Tim, your most elite traveler, prefers to be contacted once a quarter and would like to donate a portion of his travel points to charity. These types of insights make all the difference in such a competitive industry. Are your business decisions reflecting the needs of your top tier customers?

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