JetBlue
JetBlue Turns Brand Loyalty into a Renewable Resource
In a recession, travelers adopt what looks like impulsiveness. People still travel, but they make the decision to buy airline tickets with a shorter lead time, capitalizing on the airlines’ last-minute scramble to fill planes. It’s more a conviction to seize opportunity rather than plan ahead—and it’s changed the tone of travel completely.
Bryan Jeppsen is the Senior Analyst of Customer Feedback for JetBlue. He says simply: “If we’re going to be the first choice when a customer buys on impulse, we need to listen in ways we never have before.”
In most cases, eroding returns prompt brands to try new things. But JetBlue’s hunger for listening came about at what some might consider an unusual moment—at a performance peak.
“We were making a profit—which is significant for an airline, especially these days,” Jeppsen explains. “If we were going to protect that profit, we knew we’d have to do something different. So we decided to start listening to our customers in more actionable ways.”
The Challenge:
Protect profits by finding out what customers really love about JetBlue—and replicate more of it.
The Solution:
Engage high-value, frequent travelers on a panel that aims to tap their opinion, engage them more deeply in the brand and collect their recommendations to improve the airline’s loyalty program.
The Result:
A relaunch of the True Blue loyalty program to give high-value, repeat customers the incentives, features and gratitude they want—and by their own design.
A Starting Point of Customer Love: JetBlue Surveys What Travelers Want
JetBlue is a small airline. Compared to the giants with thousands of planes in the air at any given moment, the company can change quickly based on what they learn from customers on the ground.
“In a recent text analysis of all our customer comments, the number one piece of feedback repeated over and over again was simply we love JetBlue,” Jeppsen says. “We know buying patterns are changing. And we know that our customers are affectionate towards our brand to the point where they’d enjoy participating in the redesign of our loyalty program.”
The company had noticed different buying behaviors among leisure and business travelers—such as last-minute purchasing—but how could seeing this new reality translate into knowing what grassroot, customer-desired changes were needed?
The Loyalty Listeners
As a small airline, JetBlue has always prided itself on treating all its customers with equal respect—a lack of disparity that’s very appealing for value-minded travelers. But as Jeppsen explains, the company hasn’t historically made traveling more comfortable for those people who fly with them the most—for that segment of enthusiastic, frequent fliers represented by the members of the TrueBlue program.
“Vision Critical gave us a forum for us to connect,” he recalls. “With ongoing customer panels, we’re able to tap an incredibly rich and candid source of insight on the absolute truth of our brand—and VC has always been incredibly responsive in helping us to navigate this resource.”
As Jeppsen developed and began to access the panel for insight, a circumstance arose in which he needed help creating a particular survey. Of the varied avenues for help, he chose Vision Critical’s live chat, hoping to get an answer quickly without having to step away from the task in question.
“I was instantly connected with George—from Vision Critical’s support team,” says Jeppsen. “He ran through several options with me and then asked if he could call me, knowing it would be quicker to walk me through it. It was easy and personal and instant. And most importantly, it was human, and relevant to what I needed. That’s the kind of response that inspires confidence.”
Using established ongoing panels—which revisit the same consumer pool for feedback on new ideas, products or events, JetBlue was now ready to watch how customer opinions fluctuated along with new approaches.
“To really know how to improve something—and to find out what works—you need more than a one-off,” says Jeppsen. “The people on the panel are already qualified as being interested in sharing with us exactly what would make them feel more valued and more loyal. They are intelligent and invested brand enthusiasts. The tone of our relationship with them—and from them to us—is candid and forthright, which is an extraordinary state of mind when it comes to doing business.”
The TrueBlue Panel in Action
When it came time to recruit opinions, the company had an easy time of it. 15,000 loyalty program members were segmented by gender, travel frequency and other markers, and the first comprehensive survey built a complete demographic picture of each customer. Quarterly incentives were offered to participants (round-trip tickets) for their presence, and the panel was a go.
“Once the panel was assembled and tested, we could see instantly how helpful it would be in helping us redesign TrueBlue,” says Jeppsen. “The speed and quality of insight is incredible. For instance, a senior crew member wanted to know why more people didn’t check in online. She had some theories, but wanted strategy and improvements to be based on the definitive truth from the customers instead of on guesswork.”
Although the question fell outside the panel’s usual application (finding out ways to improve the loyalty program), Jeppsen decided that the TrueBlue group, already populated with frequent travelers, was the ideal venue for a quick ping on check-in efficiency.
“I remember her asking me, ‘How long will this take?’ She didn’t believe me when I told her that we’d see a 30-50% response rate the next day, and up to 80% if we left it there a week. She was amazed.”
Within a couple of days the question had its answer: the reason more travelers don’t pre-print boarding passes is because they bring bags that need to be checked with an agent anyway.
As a brand marketer, Jeppsen says this degree of insight almost makes him giddy: “It’s addictive to be able to tap the absolute truth whenever you like, the absolute truth being how your brand is seen through the eyes of your customers.”
“Without Vision Critical, our loyalty strategy would have been based on opinions,” he says. “Our fate as a business would rely upon the best guesses of people who have designed programs in other industries, and of people who worked at Delta, or United, or even for us for ten years.”
Despite this wealth of varied experiences, JetBlue’s future would have been dictated by people with individual viewpoints of customer life as opposed to the guidance of a quantifiable, day-to-day pulse.
“Without our partnership with Vision Critical, we might have tried typical, low-yield, anecdotal focus groups,” says Jeppsen. “We would have taken our top ten customers for dinner and asked ‘What do you want?’ That’s better than nothing, but it’s not definitive, near-instant feedback from 15,000 qualified, motivated customers. When it comes to designing and implementing relevant strategy, it’s pretty much impossible to beat that.”
