AirAsia's 2mil ticket giveaway is a fantastic campaign. It does two things:
1. Creates a market/industry buzz: in an industry where the giants are struggling (read: MAS), for an airline to give away tickets for free goes against the grain. Result: customers flocking to AirAsia + consumer goodwill + additional pressure on the competition (that's always a good thing). 2mil customers for me = 2mil less customers for you.
2. Reduces overall cost of operations: don't be fooled -- very few routes fly with 100% capacity. Its not uncommon for flights to take off with 30, 40, even 50+ seats empty; AirAsia knows the average capacity for each route and knows how many seats it can give away -- obviously for popular routes (e.g. KL-PEN), there may be fewer available free seats. So it costs nothing to give away those seats that would otherwise be empty anyway especially since it does Item 1 (read above). An additional side effect (i may be mistaken about this) is that certain operational costs such as airport fees/taxes remain constant, and since this cost is passed on the customer who will be taking up those 50 seats that would otherwise be empty anyway, this means an overall decrease in operational costs.
*yes, the 2mil tickets are FREE, but the caveat is that the customer is still required to pay for corresponding airport taxes/fees, which in some cases adds up to 40% of the total cost of the ticket for the customer. So the customer still needs to pay a some monies.
So the concept is pretty good, but the execution, i must say, sucks to high-heaven.
1. The website is barely accessible during the day. I had 5 tabbed screens open yesterday, throughout the day, all attempting to connect to the website. Most times, the main page was inaccessible. On the occasions when the screen was accessible, a search for the tickets i wanted resulted in another error screen. There are 5-6 pages the customer needs to go through before the tickets are confirmed. With each page, there is a possibility of a broken connection or an error, requiring the customer to return back to the first page and start again the process. There was once where i had reached the 2nd last page, then i hit an error, then i had to start all over again. Major frustration here.
More than an hour of trying lapsed before i gave up.
Its obvious the website could not handle the overload the campaign had created. A classic case of the infrastructure not supporting the business. This isn't be the first business campaign that has suffered from this problem, but you would have expected AirAsia to have learned from its past mistakes.
2. The website didn't work. What were the alternatives: the call center. Dialling the 1-300 number resulted in a consistent engaged tone. After 30 min of trying there, i gave up (i can only bear hitting the re-dial button so many times). Then i noticed another number, the one AirAsia offers for "customers calling from outside Malaysia" -- its a 03- number, so i thought why not. Tried that a few times, got the engaged tone at first, then suddenly i got on.
The experience was pleasant enough for a moment -- the IVR worked well and i was breezing through the program until i hit 2 snags:
a. The system uses voice recognition to identify where you are departing from and where you want to go. For some reason, it couldn't recognize what i was saying and kept on offering me the destination where i didn't want to go. The system also works on a 3 strike basis, so after the third failed attempt to correctly identify my destination, the system said, "Thank you, we still cannot identify your destination," and hung up on me.
*Proposed solution: route the call to a "LIVE" person after 3 failed attempts -- this shows the customer that you care enough to speak to me personally to help me out. Most of the steps have already been done anyways, so the time spent with a live CS representative would have been minimal.
b. I tried again, the system still couldn't recognize the destination i wanted correctly, but i didn't mind, i just carried on to see what the conclusion to the process would be like.
After the destinations and dates have been picked, the system offers you the available flights -- this was a nightmare. The IVR spewed out the flight numbers (like i would know what that means) and the departure and arrival times (too quick, there was no way to hear it properly). Then it asked me to choose which flight i wanted. Quite silly considering the way the choices were presented to me was almost completely beyond my comprehension. So then, i hung up.
Again, in a situation like this, the customer should be offered the option of speaking to a live person. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating, and though i got my tickets eventually -- logging on in the dead of night when the rest of Malaysia was asleep -- customers should not be expected to go through such a poor experience when they want to do business with you.
Conclusion
Pros:
- Great concept, good campaign
Cons
- Terrible infrastructure and workflow processes are unable to support the business requirements.
More than 2 hours spent = no tickets. A lot of potential customer dissatisfaction. In such a competitive industry, the adage "if you don't look after your customers, then someone else will" certainly holds true. If you really want the tickets, i would recommend trying to get on in the middle of the night when no one else is on.
Leave a comment