Dallas-based AMR Corporation, the parent company of domestic and international carrier American Airlines and regional carrier American Eagle, is a worldwide leader in air transportation services.
In an intensely competitive marketplace, knowledge is power. The more an airline can learn about what its customers like and don't like about its offerings, the more effective it can be at building customer loyalty and maximizing its revenues. Of course, the resource cost of obtaining and processing this information must be carefully controlled. Airlines need:
The power and ease of use of PASW Statistics enables the AMR Consumer Research department to perform more research than ever before, and deliver timely reports while maintaining a small, dedicated staff.
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In the intensely competitive world of air transportation, carriers are constantly searching for a differentiating edge. Increasingly, customer loyalty is proving to be one of the most vital factors in keeping seats filled and airline revenues high.
How does AMR build loyalty? By learning more about its customers--what they like, and what they don't like. But with more than 3,700 flights carrying some 250,000 passengers between 233 cities every day, there's a lot of data to digest. Making sense of it all is the responsibility of AMR's Consumer Research Department, and of Senior Analyst and Database Manager King Douglas.
"We are continuously scanning the environment and measuring our customer satisfaction in dozens of categories against data from other airlines, as well as against our own past performance," Douglas explained. "We're looking to uncover any weaknesses early on, so we can address them before they can hurt us in the marketplace."
To get this information, Douglas "boards" more than a dozen different surveys--in nine different languages--on about 100 randomly-selected American and American Eagle flights each day. The surveys range from general tracking surveys to specific "ad hoc" surveys custom-created for a particular AMR Department. Food & Beverage, for example, might want to know more about the success of its new entree selections, or Inflight Services might want to know if passengers enjoyed the new onboard video games.
In addition, Douglas' group solicits feedback through focus groups and telephone interviews. Information also flows in through flight attendant reports, letters, and other sources. And, of course, there are operational variables such as type of aircraft, flight attendants and crew onboard, delay data, and passenger volume flowing in as well. In the drive to increase customer loyalty, AMR tracks all of these variables and more and analyzes them using PASW Statistics.
... our senior managers are alerted to potential problems a lot more quickly and accurately. That helps them take action and, ultimately, to ensure more people are in our seats, rather than those of our competitors.
— King Douglas
Senior Analyst
AMR Corporation
To analysts like Douglas, changes in data trends are a red flag, and the more tell-tale changes he is able to uncover and bring to the attention of senior managers, the more reliable, fact-based decisions they can make.
"The Consumer Research department has tripled its productivity since adding PASW Statistics to our office systems," said Douglas. "We're able to do more tracking surveys, and take on far more ad hoc research requests from our internal clients." This increased efficiency is important, because demand for their services is also higher than ever before.
Our internal clients are very interested in the information we are generating, and they're even more excited when they can get answers in a matter of days, rather than weeks," said Douglas.
The time saved through PASW Statistics enables Consumer Research to be proactive, enabling them to work with internal clients early in the process to identify new research opportunities. And, using PASW Statistics gives Douglas more time to follow up with clients and company experts to get additional, illuminating information and background.
According to Douglas, much of the credit for the increased productivity goes to PASW Statistics' ease of use.
"PASW Statistics is extremely user-friendly and can be used by a non-programmer. Before using PASW Statistics, we had to jump through hoops to program macros to get what we needed," he said.
Although there is always a demand for greater amounts of effective intelligence, the resource cost of obtaining and delivering it is always of concern to management.
"One big measure of our department's success is our manpower costs," noted Douglas. "Our plates are full, but we are able to keep up with demand without hiring additional analysts, which is a very expensive process. Again, it is a factor of increased productivity--what I am doing today, three analysts couldn't have done before we started using PASW Statistics."
Douglas considers PASW Statistics to be as much a service as a product, noting the added benefits of working with consultants and training departments.
He also notes that PASW Statistics proved flexible from the very beginning, when SPSS Inc. engineers worked with him to build a bridge for exporting data from AMR's mainframe to the analysts' PCs, a capability which has proven invaluable to his department.
"SPSS Inc. took my problems personally and worked hard to create effective solutions," said Douglas.
SPSS Inc. continues to work with AMR to make its products more valuable, and Douglas, for his part, has become a company champion for the software.
"AMR is an immensely data-driven organization, so PASW Statistics can help us make greater use of this resource. Just the other day, I met with another AMR department, and ran some correlations in PASW Statistics between their data and historical consumer research data," he said. "It just knocked their socks off."
Through his own department, Douglas believes that PASW Statistics is helping to give both American Airlines and American Eagle a competitive edge.
"You can't put a dollar figure on customer loyalty, but I know that with PASW Statistics, our senior managers are alerted to potential problems a lot more quickly and accurately," he said. "That helps them take action and, ultimately, ensure more people are in our seats, rather than those of our competitors."
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