Remarks for Empathy Map

Empathy map provide an insight to evaluate the six perceptions of the airline passengers toward the service process. With three various purposes of taking flight, the passengers reflect their emotion and reaction partly identical and partly distinct.

First, many interviewees have identical feeling about the space of the airline, it’s crowded, narrow and confined space. For long flight distance especially, students or business travelers feel it’s uncomfortable. In addition to that, passengers prefer seamless flowing service in effectively manner. Passengers tend to react disappointed if they spending too much effort to request for services. Airline company should

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provide flexible service that analyzed the intuitive apprehensive and motivation of the passengers.

Second, passengers with different flight objectives project various feeling toward several service. For business travelers, they considered taking flight as transportation to work, they do not have any additional emotion toward it. On the other hand, students possess perception like going home or going somewhere that is familiar to them. For tourists, it’s the opposite, they are thinking going somewhere that is unusual and exotic.

For tourists, they do not consider the quality of the meal service as essential. As the flight distance is shorter, and often it’s only one meal. However, with business travelers, they deliver more suggestions and specific needs toward it, such as fruit meal, or vegetarian meal. Although some of requests are depended on their personality traits, it appears that the these are parts of service that they like it the way they want and somehow it should be easier for them to make that request.

4.6 Customer Journey Map

The customer journey map is a customer-oriented visualized scheme that sketch the journey of the airline passengers by analyzing the touch points and synthesizing interaction with the service. It is used as a design tool by interaction and service designers. The customer journey map is formed in two phase. First, the prototype of the customer journey map can be created directly from the results of three persona and empathy map. The formal customer journey map can be completed with the evaluation through the interviewees. Several suggestions and ideas as developed for the customer journey map can be very helpful and adjustments of the opportunities for the service design.

This research penetrated the pains from the customers’ perspective, exploring the

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gap that can fulfilled, and drawing out real experience and need for the airline passengers. The main finding of this research is to serve as the service design options that can suggested to the airline companies, airport design teams, terminal architects, and other additional industries that involved in the journey of the passengers. The result will provide customer to smooth, distinct, and efficient experience of entire airline service.

Figure 4-7 shows the airline service customer journey map. In this figure, there are four guiding principles. First, there are various passengers taking airplanes for different purposes such as travel, go aboard, business tour, and so on. Second, the facilities and staffs are the main touch points of airline service process. Third, the purpose of the passengers to take flight might resulted them carry with different perceptions, emotions, and reactions. Finally, passengers value the trip that is efficient, safe, relaxing and comfortable. There are five stages of the entire airline service process. In each stages, doing, thinking, and feeling of the passengers served as lens to broke down the perspectives, and detailed specifications for the ranges of the services. These five stages are identified from the previous phases of this study:

booking, check-in, boarding, in-flight, and post flight.

First, in the booking stage, online booking websites and travel agencies are both the main touch points for passengers. Travelers decide their destinations, budgets, and literary, checking price online and compare price with the travel agencies, and confirm the price and book the ticker during the booking stage. They are thinking what country, budget, and the date they are going, what is the most convenient way for them to order ticket, and which airline would give them the best offer. Their depth feeling identify they are confused about the regulations and the calculations of prices after tax. Also, the online booking websites did not provide the solutions for their inquiries. Moreover, they feel they like to get their trip planned as soon as possible.

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Second, transportations to the airport, airport terminals, check-in counters, security check, customs are the main touch points the passengers encounter in the check-in process. They are doing activities like taking transportations to the airports, waiting in line to check-in and check in baggage, and passing through carry-on baggage security check and customs check. Passengers are thinking which direction they should go to the check-in counter, if their baggage are overweight and fine by the staff, and do they have everything they need? They might possess feeling like frustration when loading their heavy baggage on the transportations. Also, they might feel the waiting in line is boring. Moreover, they feel hassle when they need to get the computer out of their carry-on baggage and repacking the baggage after the security check.

Third, in the boarding stage, boarding gate, VIP lounge, duty free stores, restaurants, restrooms are the main touch points for passengers. In the stage, passengers engage themselves in irregular activities before announcement for boarding. These activities are eating and drinking at the restaurants, shopping at the duty-free stores, relaxing in the VIP lounges, listening to the music, playing game, connecting wifi, chatting, and waiting in front of the boarding gate. They might possess different thoughts due to various activities they have done. For passengers shopping at the duty-free stores, they might wonder if they provided varieties of merchandise and the price of merchandise they want. For passengers waiting in front of boarding gate, they might feel bored and wonder if there are any other activities they can do. Passengers who are using their phone feel frustrated if their mobile phone battery is dead. Moreover, passengers likes to know their flight status, and if there are information provided for them to insure.

Fourth, in the in-flight stage, in-flight entertainment, seat, and cabin crews are the main touch points for passengers. Customers might engage themselves into

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various activities with limitation of choice during the in-flight process. In fact, they participate mostly in watching in-flight entertainment, rest and sleep, and standard in-flight service procedures. Also, passengers might want to lay back their seat, but they have hesitation if their action will bring inconvenient to other passengers. In additional to that, they might think what kind of activities they should get engage.

Moreover, they feel disappointed and frustrated if the cabin crews cannot respond to their needs immediately or sit in uncomfortable seats for long hours.

Finally, in the post flight stage, baggage claim, transportations, direction sign, and information center are the main touch points for passengers. Looking direction for baggage claim, and transfer to another flight or entering arrival lobby, making phone call or using wifi to contact people, taking subway map or city guide, and looking for direction to take transportations are the activities passengers do in this stage. They possess with questions like where should they go to transfer, what direction they should go to take the transportation, which wifi should they connect to. Also, for travelers that like to have channels to share their experience of their journey, they might have questions like what’s the platforms for complaints or compliments.

Moreover, passengers will feel rush when they need to transfer, or frustrate if they cannot contact with their families or friends, and being lost the direction.

There are several opportunities identified by mapping out the experience of the customer. First, travel package with wider range of accommodate planning and booking, airport direct transportation with facilities with ease to load baggage or airport delivery service, and precise functions for selection of date and price after tax of the online booking system from the booking process. Second, space to weight baggage and repack baggage, flexible and insightful passenger service strategies, and longer length to get thing out and repack carry-on belonging at the security check for the boarding process. Third, mobile App for customer to ensure sear and flight status,

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lounge provided tablets, computer, or other technologies, wider price range and selections of products of the duty free stores, secured place to put carry-on baggage when the passenger is alone and want to go somewhere else for the boarding process.

Fourth, seats with wider space for legs, armrests, and longer length for cushion around the head for the in-flight service. Finally, better vision designed direction sign and the space for the subway map or official tour map, multiple service provided in one desk:

phone card, accommodation information, airport pick up, and information desk, and platforms to share experience with airline company and other customers for the post flight process.

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Figure 4 6 Airline Service Customer Journey Map

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CHAPTER FIVE

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTIONS

The study was set out to explore customer-oriented service design of airline from a process perspective of three flight representations of customers and has identified the opportunities and pain, lens, touch points, motion, perceptions and sentiments of the passengers. This study sought to discover the following questions: (1) The portrayals of target users who possess common behavioral characteristics that are suggested by persona. (2)The feeling, expectations, six perceptions and conversation of the passengers identified from empathy map. (3) The analysis of the user experience and figures the quality of a process or service through customer journey map. Overall, this research objective is to aid the design of customer-oriented service of airline industry. The research implications, limitation and future research direction will discuss in this chapter.