Budget airline easyJet has come a long way in its comparatively short, 20-year history. Even rival low-cost carrier Ryanair – still viewed as something of an upstart in certain quarters – is 10 years older. 

The business, founded by entrepreneur Stelios Haji-Ioannou, began with only a pair of leased Boeing 737 aircraft, flying from Luton to two destinations: Glasgow and Edinburgh. Today, it is a listed company, carrying around 65 million passengers a year across Europe and generating £4.5bn in annual revenue. Its vivid orange and white brand colours enjoy massive recognition, and it has serious aspirations to become Europe’s preferred short-haul airline, while sticking to the notion that travel should be easy and affordable. 

These brand values are deeply ingrained and readily articulated; after all, the business is not called hardJet. Yet even for a company with such a familiar brand name and clear proposition, building business in the tough short-haul flights market presents enormous challenges. Clearly, understanding customer purchasing behaviour and motivation is fundamental to future success. 

In charge of getting to the bottom of it all is Lis Blair, easyJet’s head of CRM and insight, who joined the airline in 2012. 

“There has always been this real appetite for customer insight [at easyJet],” she says. “Very quickly, I set about trying to put in place a framework to enable us to deliver against that, and get our single, customer-view database sorted out internally. We also had to make sure we had the right agency partners to work with, so that we have the right data coming in day by day, week by week, month by month – to give us that total view.”

Blair works closely with three agencies. Data-driven ad agency Havas Helia is responsible for database marketing and CRM, while easyJet partners with Join the Dots and Millward Brown on the market research side. Join the Dots runs the airline’s customer community, while Millward Brown handles major tracking studies. All of the agencies are brought together for quarterly insight meetings to compare notes and sharpen up briefs.

Customer feedback

EasyJet’s online customer community features around 3,000 people – a mix of business and leisure travellers, drawn mainly from the UK, France, Italy and Switzerland. Each week they are sent an email asking for their input into a couple of research topics. Participants are incentivised with a monthly prize draw, but – as Join the Dots has established through research with Salford University – the main reason people want to provide feedback is to help improve the service they receive. Blair describes the community as a “brilliant bunch” of people who are very good at putting easyJet right.

“With some of the things being measured elsewhere, such as c-sat [customer satisfaction] and brand, we can go a bit deeper by using communities,” says Join the Dots’ senior research director Paul Child. “We’re lucky enough to have some pretty good reach into the easyJet business in terms of different stakeholders: customer experience, product teams and some of the operational guys place briefs with us.”

For more than five years, the online customer community has proved to be a valuable tool for gauging passenger opinion, and it continues to grow, with the occasional tweak here and there.  Blair has made more radical changes to other aspects of the research mix, however. Two major European tracking programmes – one for brand, the other covering customer satisfaction – were established at the beginning of 2013, when Millward Brown was brought in to replace GfK. 

“We built our brand and our customer-satisfaction programmes to work together,” explains Blair. “We have bridging questions between the two so we can create and understand that link between brand perceptions and experience – and, ultimately, company performance.” 

Brand research is conducted through Millward Brown’s Lightspeed panel and concentrates, to a large degree, on how easyJet is perceived in the market. Comparisons are made between the perceptions of customers and non-customers. The panel is also used for competitor benchmarking and advertising evaluation. At the heart of the programme is Millward Brown’s Meaningfully Different framework for understanding brand equity. 

A thorough customer-satisfaction programme runs in tandem with the brand research. Every month, interviews are conducted with between 35,000 and 40,000 customers from across Europe, all contacted the day after travel. They are invited, via email, to take part in an online survey with a view to benchmarking their experience across the different stages of their trip – from booking, to departure, flight, arrival and return journey, if applicable. Verbatim comments are captured along the way. 

“Information is reported back regularly via online dashboards and is widely used across the organisation to monitor overall company performance, but also at a more granular level,” says Blair. “Our base managers [the easyJet operational heads at each airport], for example, will be living and breathing that data to understand how they are performing, and how they compare to other similar bases.”

The intention is to make the data as actionable as possible, giving base managers the information they need to address any service-delivery problems. Base managers can filter information using a graphical user interface (GUI) reporting dashboard to hone in on particular issues of concern – for instance, bag-drop comments over the previous week, or feedback from passengers travelling with children. Needless to say, Blair and the central customer team also have access to this data.

Queue times

A couple of years ago, the data pointed to increasing queue times at Gatwick. This was no small matter because Gatwick is easyJet’s most significant base, serving more than 100 routes. Moreover, the airline is by far Gatwick’s biggest customer, flying 41% of all passengers from the airport. 

There was a potential for reputational damage, as a large number of passengers were being affected. The airline quickly set to work, therefore, on understanding customer tolerance levels, gaining insight into the point at which time spent queuing became a ‘dissatisfier’. It also looked closely at the Gatwick performance data to pinpoint the causes of the problem. 

“As we have a lot of passengers going through Gatwick, we have a lot of sample data,” says Blair. “We could look almost hour by hour during the day: when are we seeing peaks and troughs in queue length and, therefore, customer satisfaction? We used that to work with Gatwick and the staff there to say, actually, we have issues around breakfast time, lunchtime and teatime – so how do we make sure we have the right staffing levels to coincide with that?” 

An example of how easyJet integrates insight across the organisation is the annual path analysis, conducted to understand the relationships and relative importance of each part of the customer journey in driving overall satisfaction. This has enabled the airline to build what Blair calls a “what-if tool” – essentially, it is a modelling tool that helps determine which elements of the journey should be prioritised for improvement to deliver the biggest impact on overall satisfaction. This is then used when working with colleagues in operations to determine the focus for the coming months and set targets for improvement. 

Even though Gatwick is now, by far, easyJet’s biggest operational base, its headquarters are still at Luton Airport. In 2006, the business upsized to Hangar 89, a 1970s building formerly occupied by Britannia/TUI, which was modernised and repainted in hard-to-miss easyJet orange – travellers frequently mistake the building for a departure terminal. Plane-cabin chairs provide the seating in the heavily branded reception area, while the upstairs meeting room – in which Blair and I talk – is, for the most part, typical of a standard office building. Apart, that is, from two aircraft windows at the back of the room that offer views into the vast easyJet maintenance hangar, a space big enough to house three planes from the fleet at any one time. 

Data challenges

It’s all quite a change from Barclays, where Blair cut her teeth. For a start, easyJet is a far leaner organisation. Blair has one research manager for the whole of Europe, and three people in CRM – the same as she had for just one customer segment at Barclays.

So how does easyJet compare with life at a financial services colossus? “Wherever you go you’ve got the same challenges with data – challenges with pulling it together, with agency management and all the bits and pieces that come with that,” says Blair. 

“In terms of the big differences, and what I’ve learned and really enjoyed at easyJet, it’s how to think differently about stuff. At Barclays, we had huge budgets; a huge team; masses of customer data. What financial services don’t know about you, you could write on the back of a stamp. Come to easyJet, and there is a lot less that we know. We can infer some things from our data to help with targeted marketing, but you just have to think harder and smarter.”

The biggest revelation for Blair on making the move into the airline sector was the complexity of the customer-buying decision around flights. Price, times, brand and location all come into play, with the relative importance of each factor dialled up or down depending on customer segment, the reason for travel and so on.

Of course, the airline keeps a weather eye on booking trends, from party size to choice of destination. Given the prevalence of smartphones and tablets, it’s no surprise that mobile has become an increasingly significant booking channel. EasyJet has developed a well-regarded app, which has been downloaded by more than 10m people, and use of mobile boarding passes is growing. 

The airline is also trialling push messaging via the app at Gatwick – for example, notifying departing passengers when their gate is open and directing arriving passengers towards the appropriate luggage carousel.

Strategic change

For many years, easyJet was a ‘free seating’ airline; however, it became apparent that the free-for-all dash for seats – referred to unofficially as ‘the scrum’ – was a moment of stress for passengers, and a barrier to purchase for many business travellers. This insight led to strategic change, and allocated seating was introduced in 2012. 

The change not only boosted customer satisfaction with the boarding process, but it also cleared the way for the airline to improve its position in the business market. In 2014, easyJet upped sales of its business-focused flexi fare by 48% and increased its managed business – where it has a contractual relationship with corporate customers – by 10%. The 2014 ‘White Rabbit’ TV advertising campaign, which boasted that easyJet was more punctual across Europe than British Airways, focused on the customer benefit of on-time arrival – which research had indicated was of immense importance to a business audience.

“EasyJet is very dynamic and it acts on insight to make positive change to the business and to its customers,” says Millward Brown group account director Nic Short. “Hearing the customer voice and acting on it extends right up to the most senior levels. CEO Carolyn McCall is a recipient of all the insight and it’s discussed at board meetings. 

“It’s a joy to work with because you’re not delivering something that’s going to sit on a shelf. Perhaps more than any client I’ve worked with, easyJet looks to amplify insight. By linking different sources of insight together, it takes it even further.” 

To that end, easyJet is working with Millward Brown on gathering insight into the relationship between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. The project seeks to identify the extent to which staff satisfaction influences the nature of interactions with customers and, by extension, the overall customer experience. 

Blair is keen to make the point that the company board considers research and customer insight to be a strategic asset. There’s a lot of hard work going into making sure that the ‘easy’ part of the airline’s name rings true among its customers.