How a Spanish airline makes data-driven decisions to unlock customer opportunities.
Apr 20, 2022
Summary:
- Vueling uses Quantum Metric to support an MVP test-and-iterate approach, strengthening A/B testing and personalization for a growing base of leisure travelers.
- Session replay, heat maps, and click maps help Vueling spot friction points, design issues, and errors, turning business problems into customer experience opportunities.
- By benchmarking and improving page speed, Vueling lifted conversion rates and identified potential annual savings of up to $3 million.
- Quantum Metric extends traditional analytics by tying user experience improvements to revenue impact and conversion performance.
- The platform helps democratize data access across Vueling, enabling cross-functional teams and executives to make aligned, data-driven decisions under a Continuous Product Design framework.
Here’s a look at the key results Vueling achieved by using Quantum Metric.
- Vueling boosted their A/B testing strategy by adoption a MVP test-and-iterate mindset.
- The digital team identified where they needed to increase page loading speed, which in turn boosted conversion rates and resulted in up to $3 million in annual savings.
- Quantum Metric helped democratize access to data insights across the organization.
Quantum Metric is helping Vueling find “light bulb moments” that change how they approach building the customer experience.
Like every airline, Vueling has had to adapt radically to the changing travel landscape over the past 24 months. Airlines are having to re-orientate themselves towards leisure travelers, who have a much wider, predictable range of individual needs. With a goal of increasing levels of personalized service, the team additionally measures success against customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Alex Thomson, who leads the EMEA team at Quantum Metric, met with Adam Barnes, head of eCommerce at Vueling, to discuss how Vueling addressed industry-wide challenges in the last 6 months of 2021.
Getting personal with the growing number of leisure travelers.
Across the airline industry, business travel is rebounding much slower than leisure travel. For the airline industry at large, this is a seismic shift.
With Quantum Metric, Vueling is able to see this larger trend in their own data by segmenting users into business and leisure travelers. According to the data, most Vueling bookings are now coming from leisure travelers.
The shift from business to leisure travel has opened the door for a different form of personalisation. Unlike business folks, who are accustomed to frequent travel, leisure passengers come from all sorts of backgrounds, and many of them have not flown much or all since the pandemic struck.
Vueling now recognizes that they want to keep “as much of the experience that the user has with us as relevant as possible.”
But how? By testing new experiences for customers.
Quantum Metric has made it easier for Vueling to A/B test new products and features, thanks to the platform’s heat maps, click maps, and session replay. These tools give visibility into how travelers actually navigate through the product, as well as help the team identify friction points.
Now, the team has adopted a MVP test-and-iterate mindset, in which they are doing as much personalization as possible and exhausting all of the available avenues “to get information back and to find out whether that was relevant for customers.”
When a product is successful, it should increase both customer satisfaction, conversion rate, and revenue.
Take action out of the box with Quantum Metric..
For Vueling, getting started with Quantum Metric was relatively easy. According to Barnes, “two lines of code were added into a tag manager and we were live.” While many SaaS providers provide just two lines of code, Barnes explained, “the level of functionality that you get from two lines of code and the specific coding, tagging or mapping data layers was absolutely fantastic. That made it really, really easy to get on board.”
Right away, the Vueling was captivated by watching session replays, as well as “the richness of the information that was available to them.” Within a few hours, the team started noticing errors, design problems, and customer frustrations they hadn’t picked up on before.
Quantum Metric extended the power of more traditional tools like Google Analytics by providing crucial visibility into how improving the user experience can drive revenue and conversions.
Business problems become CX opportunities.
Since Airlines have so many components to their business, there are constantly new opportunities to boost the customer experience. Yet the business needs to confront the reality of the hierarchy of what products and services matter most.
According to Barnes, sometimes teams don’t always understand the upside to the opportunities presented. With Quantum Metric, Vueling has been able to more easily focus on their bottom line by identifying which products to improve, as well as which new products to build and launch.
Understanding and addressing customer frustration.
On a high level, Quantum Metric helps Vueling understand where conversion rates and average order values unexpectedly increase or decrease.
The platform enables teams of varying levels to identify the root cause of the problem, whether it’s a broken button or a slow-loading page. “What people are clicking on buttons and it’s not working, those types of behavioral data are really helpful for the team to have,” according to Barnes.
Benchmarking page speed.
Being able to identify slow loading pages is crucial, especially for the homepage, which is an important entry point for Vueling customers. They also use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights to benchmark web landing pages.
With Quantum Metric, Vueling benchmark against a standard load time. Almost right away, the Vueling team discovered around 35% of sessions were loading slower than their benchmark. They also discovered that users who had a faster time had 3X higher conversion rates. Over a 12 month period, slow page loading times could result in the loss of upwards to $3 million, according to Quantum Metric
The bottom line?
Even if some of “this is correlation and not necessarily causation,” Barnes explained, the numbers can still help you understand the relationship between your business value and digital products.
If one-third of your customers are seeing slow-loading pages and consequently have a lower overall conversion rate, then you should address it.
Democratizing data access across the organization.
Before Quantum Metric, Vueling had an agile system in place for its engineers that emphasized delivering new digital products.
With Quantum Metric, Vueling is taking the concept of agile and applying it across the organization, a framework known as Continuous Product Design.
According to Barnes, a platform like Quantum Metric “can change the dynamic of the culture internally” if your organization has support from senior figures. Barnes recalled sitting with Vueling CTO during the proof of concept. The CTO was drawn to the opportunity section, which he referred to as a “director and C-suite fishing line.”
Once executives can gain easy visibility into opportunities, that allows them to trust that their employees are making the right decisions. This helps remove the top-down approach to building products. Now, programmers, business owners, UX designers, and other stakeholders who work on-the-ground can make meaningful, data-driven decisions that positively impact the business’s bottom line, as well as the customer experience.
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