Service design for Copa Airlines on resolution managment
Designit was asked to explore new opportunities to improve the future customer experience of Copa passengers from booking, all the way to the final destination.
As the project lead and service designer, I was responsible for planning all design activities based on the given project brief. Throughout the project different designers and researchers joined, when needed.
Juni.co
Overview
Benchmarking Copa's customer journey
Copa Airlines wanted to gain a very granular understanding of the preferences, needs and wants of their customer base and identify gaps in product and service delivery within these segments. For this project, we mainly focused on frequent fliers as they are returning customers that account for a large part of the revenue.
Since the results of the engagement had to be executed inside the context of Copa’s current business model, brand and values, we excluded any changes to the company’s identity, fleet, or aircraft configuration, and rather focused on the service delivery.
Competitor flights
As the first activity of the research we completed 4 competitor flights with Avianca, American Airlines, Latam and Spirit in order to understand the competitive landscape with its main differentiators.
All flights were documented with comments and pictures along the most relevant touchpoints of the travel journey. Flights were ranging from short haul to long haul, from day to night flights, from business to economy class.
Gaining qualitative insights from customer interviews
We conducted 11 qualitative interviews with Copa customers, that took place in Panama City, San José, and only a few online. Each interview took 2 hours, and was structured into an introduction, Copa travel journey, pre and post flight expeirences. All pain and gain points have been consolidated and layed out in a Copa journey.
Mystery flights
While bein in Latin America ourselves to do on site interviews with customers, we took the chance to take a few Copa flights ourselves, to gain first hand experience, that we could compare with the experiences customers had.
Research synthesis and workshop
After all research activities have been completed we were looking at all the data that has been collected at once, from the customer interviews, competitor flights and also stakeholder interviews, looking for connections and similarities. All insights have been presented and discussed in an in person werkshop in our Munich office.
Identifying opportunities for future customer journey
With all insights laid out along the travel journey, we discussed with Copa how they all relate to eachother and started consolidating them into groups
Turning insights into opportunity areas
Out of the journeys and passengers painpoints, we created opportunity areas that would have the biggest impact on passengers satisfaction.
Ideating within opportunity areas
Together with Copa, and based on the opportunity areas, we first drafted a set of How Might We questions, before coming up with possible solutions, that we later grouped in 3 main concept areas.
Mapping ideal future journey
We also laid out those ideas in an ideal future journey as well as individual journeys for the personas, highlighting their distinct needs.
Prototyping key moments
Some of the ideas created in the previous phase where distinct to certain of our personas. We laid out single screens or short flows along their journey to visualize first solutions.
Consolidating concepts into design initiatives
While the final deliverable of the projects has been an interactive prototype for one particular situation, we discovered many more areas along the journey that need improvement. Those have been documented in opportunity areas and concrete design initiatives (briefs) and can be taken further by Copa beyond this project engagement.
Vision prototyping
While this project revealed many possibilities where to improve, eventually we wanted to tell the story through a very fundamental case, an irregular scenario of a delayed and cancelled flight.
