A recent SAS press release highlighted how they're using technology to make their passengers journey smoother. Many of these innovations are mobile related. For example, they are doing some nice stuff around mobile check-in and supporting mobile bar-coded boarding passes (mBCBP).
And, it's good to see SAS offering SMS services alongside their mobile-web portal. It's all to easy to get carried away by the hype these days and think that mobile is purely about downloadable applications. The reality is: SMS is still the only mobile technology that allows you to reach near 100% of your customers ... although let's not forget that mobile-web adoption is growing apace, doubling in the US in the past year.
But, back to SMS, and specifically what role does it have to play in the mobile travel experience?
Using SMS for "Pull" mobile travel services
The SAS service is a PULL service. It allows travellers to text in keywords to access timetable info, booking details, etc - which sounds like a great, customer-focused idea.
But ... a couple of years ago we did some small scale trials of this type of service for ourselves ...
We asked people to text in a keyword (e.g. EAT, NIGHTLIFE) to get activity suggestions for their destination. However, we soon abandoned this experiment, because people simply didn't use the service. Feedback from customers told us that there was nothing particularly wrong with the service, it was just they either didn't think to use the service when they were travelling or they couldn't remember the keywords. And, off-the-record conversations with travel companies who've tried similar services indicate that they've seen similar underwhelming results.
Keywords work best when they're a response to a promotion (e.g. a billboard encouraging you to text BROCHURE to a short-code) - and the SAS service may well be promoted in this way (e.g using in-airport advertising, and through promotion in their in-flight magazine) which would give it an advantage. But, in general, for a travel service, my comments about first generation mobile-web applications apply - we're simply asking the traveller to work too hard relative to the value of information provided.
When it comes to using SMS as a PULL technology with travellers, the only exception we've found is with an "any questions answered" type service, where people text in free form enquiries and get an answer back from a human expert. We've used this successfully with our destination assistance service which provides answers to questions about the local area, language translation, and a live interpreter in an emergency. I think this works because we're not asking people to work too hard ... they don't have to remember too much and the value they get out of the interaction outweighs the effort of sending the text.
Using SMS for "Push" mobile travel services
However, I believe the real value SMS brings to any mobile travel service is as a PUSH technology. SMS is perfectly adapted to the role of pro-actively sending information (e.g. itinerary reminders, flight changes, boarding calls, delay notifications, daily weather forecasts, links to mobile-web applications, etc) to travellers when they're on the move - and, in this context, no other technology can match the reach or reliability of SMS, which is why I think it should form a part of every travel companies customer contact strategy.
0 comments:
Post a Comment