Case Example: Air India
World’s largest DIRECT MARKETING ASSOCIATION recognizes AIR INDIA as first airline to use a unique database-driven CRM approach that set new sales and profit records in the air travel market.
On June 5, 2002; at world headquarters in New York, Charles A. Prescott, Vice President of International Development for the United States-based Direct Marketing Association, approved the addition of Air India’s database-driven Direct Marketing program to DMA’s Web site. Entitled “Test of Advanced CRM Approach in India sets new sales records for an Airline” it instantly became one of the most visited parts of the DMA Web site.
Why? Because Air India created an intensely personal dialogue with each individual customer in a way no airline ever had in the past. Personal dialogues which created relationships, which produced record gains in Share of Customer, and overall Share of Market as well as revenue and profits. When Abeer Chakravarty and his DM agency colleagues tested Dick Shaver’s unique Database-Loading Research Process (developed in the early 1990’s in the USA) for Indian Airlines in 1998, 58,000 customers answered extremely detailed questions about themselves. Everything from their specific air travel habits, business and personal travel wants and needs, services they expected to get from an airline and services they “would like to receive” from an airline in addition to crucial information about their air travel destinations, frequency and airlines flown as well as all their personal demographics and psychographics. In short, everything airline marketers worldwide had always wanted to know about their customers, but really never thought possible to get.
Indian Airlines immediately computerized each customer’s detailed answers in order to begin the Consumer Guided dialogues they had told customers about. Within days, every responder received a personal letter based on what each different customer had told IA. This new ability to write always-relevant, customer-specific letters rapidly expanded, in a few months, to 22 different individualized letter versions. Airline customers in India loved being treated as individuals in the late 1990’s and early 2,000’a just as much as pharmaceutical and telephone customers in the United States had loved being treated that way in the early and mid-1990’s. Not only did Database-Loading Research put them in total control of their personal information and hence their privacy… it also insured they would never again be bothered by irrelevant contacts while, at the same time, they would never miss out on any offers that fit their specific interests which they really did want to know about.
In each country and each different market… health care and long distance communication in the States, air travel in India … after their initial surprise at being listened to and then responded to based on what each one of them had said, customer satisfaction soared to historic highs. New highs in satisfaction that produced multi-year, multi-billion dollar industry records in customer retention and acquisition for Marion Merrell Dow and MCI in the USA and multi-year, multi-billion rupee gains for Indian Airlines across it’s proportionately smaller market in India.
All of which reflects the simple fact that this new CRM approach, called Consumer Guided Marketing, can produce unprecedented gains in any market and any country in the world, because the gains it generates are rooted in human nature: due to Quantum Leaps in customer trust and satisfaction. A new level of trust and satisfaction evidenced in the tens of thousands of unsolicited letters from customers that essentially said, “I’ve been filling out questionnaires for years, but nothing ever happened! But you actually read what I said and then wrote me back based on what I told you. I love it!”
World’s largest DIRECT MARKETING ASSOCIATION recognizes AIR INDIA as first airline to use a unique database-driven CRM approach that set new sales and profit records in the air travel market.
On June 5, 2002; at world headquarters in New York, Charles A. Prescott, Vice President of International Development for the United States-based Direct Marketing Association, approved the addition of Air India’s database-driven Direct Marketing program to DMA’s Web site. Entitled “Test of Advanced CRM Approach in India sets new sales records for an Airline” it instantly became one of the most visited parts of the DMA Web site.
Why? Because Air India created an intensely personal dialogue with each individual customer in a way no airline ever had in the past. Personal dialogues which created relationships, which produced record gains in Share of Customer, and overall Share of Market as well as revenue and profits. When Abeer Chakravarty and his DM agency colleagues tested Dick Shaver’s unique Database-Loading Research Process (developed in the early 1990’s in the USA) for Indian Airlines in 1998, 58,000 customers answered extremely detailed questions about themselves. Everything from their specific air travel habits, business and personal travel wants and needs, services they expected to get from an airline and services they “would like to receive” from an airline in addition to crucial information about their air travel destinations, frequency and airlines flown as well as all their personal demographics and psychographics. In short, everything airline marketers worldwide had always wanted to know about their customers, but really never thought possible to get.
Indian Airlines immediately computerized each customer’s detailed answers in order to begin the Consumer Guided dialogues they had told customers about. Within days, every responder received a personal letter based on what each different customer had told IA. This new ability to write always-relevant, customer-specific letters rapidly expanded, in a few months, to 22 different individualized letter versions. Airline customers in India loved being treated as individuals in the late 1990’s and early 2,000’a just as much as pharmaceutical and telephone customers in the United States had loved being treated that way in the early and mid-1990’s. Not only did Database-Loading Research put them in total control of their personal information and hence their privacy… it also insured they would never again be bothered by irrelevant contacts while, at the same time, they would never miss out on any offers that fit their specific interests which they really did want to know about.
In each country and each different market… health care and long distance communication in the States, air travel in India … after their initial surprise at being listened to and then responded to based on what each one of them had said, customer satisfaction soared to historic highs. New highs in satisfaction that produced multi-year, multi-billion dollar industry records in customer retention and acquisition for Marion Merrell Dow and MCI in the USA and multi-year, multi-billion rupee gains for Indian Airlines across it’s proportionately smaller market in India.
All of which reflects the simple fact that this new CRM approach, called Consumer Guided Marketing, can produce unprecedented gains in any market and any country in the world, because the gains it generates are rooted in human nature: due to Quantum Leaps in customer trust and satisfaction. A new level of trust and satisfaction evidenced in the tens of thousands of unsolicited letters from customers that essentially said, “I’ve been filling out questionnaires for years, but nothing ever happened! But you actually read what I said and then wrote me back based on what I told you. I love it!”