Wizz Air
Wizz Air uses Salesforce to turn lower costs into better experiences
Despite only launching in 2004, Budapest-based airline Wizz Air – which started out as one airline – is now operating three (Wizz Air Hungary, Wizz Air UK, and recently-launched Wizz Air Abu Dhabi), and flew over 40 million passengers in FY20.
That’s a huge amount of progress to make in such an intensely competitive industry. As a business, Wizz Air is flying high. But how has it managed to take off so quickly?
Well, despite specialising in low-cost flights Wizz Air has somehow developed a knack for using those lower costs to improve the customer experience.
Ewa Danecka is Head of Customer Experience at Wizz Air. She’s charged with ensuring that’s possible by delivering excellent customer service – even before customers have set foot on a Wizz Air plane.
“We think very specifically about the whole customer journey across segments and we feel like our customers should be having the same high-quality experience with Wizz Air whether they fly frequently with us or they’re travelling with us for the first time,” says Ewa.
Growing pains
Delivering a consistently excellent customer experience isn’t easy when you’re expanding into new markets – each of which has different expectations when it comes to air travel.
“Some of our markets – such as the UK, Austria, and Germany – are used to air travel,” says Ewa. “But in other markets – such as Albania, and Bosnia and Herzegovina – we’re much more likely to be communicating with first-time flyers. That calls for a completely different approach.”
For starters, Ewa’s team is conscious that different countries have different preferences when it comes to customer service. Some prefer email, others telephone and some only want to use certain kinds of social media.
And compounding this complexity is the fact that Wizz Air now has to communicate with its customers in 12 different languages.
“For my team,” says Andras Magyar, Systems & Development Manager at Wizz Air, “the question is: how can we manage to serve this increasing number of passengers while keeping cost flat?”
This is where Ewa and Andras’ team tap into economies of scale. The more customers they need to serve, the more flexible they need to be. With a flexible platform like Salesforce, they can deliver a better experience more reliably to more people.
Picking a platform for growth
Wizz Air’s previous (internally developed) CRM solution wasn’t designed to cope with either the scale or complexity of the airline’s operations. “It was like a big Excel file,” Andras reminisces.
For Andras, the right platform “would have to enable us to be more organized, and to leverage automation so that we could work at the speed and scale that those passenger numbers demanded.”
Ewa’s priorities, meanwhile, were naturally more focused around the sort of service the new platform would enable Wizz Air’s service agents to provide. “We wanted our agents to be able to maintain a high quality of service while also being as productive as possible,” says Ewa. “So, an important requirement as far as I was concerned was simplicity.”
This is where a better employee experience has a real and tangible impact on the customer experience. “Our agents shouldn’t have to be technical experts and we don’t want them surfing around different platforms,” explains Ewa. “Their only focus during their shifts should be serving our customers.”
Ewa wanted a platform that would give Wizz Air’s service agents a single source of truth, on a single screen, through a user-friendly dashboard. This platform would also need to enable her agents to easily communicate with both colleagues and customers in multiple languages.
Implementing Service Cloud
Wizz Air decided that the platform to meet these numerous technical and service requirements was Service Cloud. Implementation was to be handled by Salesforce’s official partner in Hungary, Attention CRM.
“In the region, we didn’t have a great deal of knowledge in Salesforce,” says Ewa. “Having Attention CRM there from the very beginning to oversee things and help us integrate systems was invaluable.”
The implementation was smoothed internally by Wizz Air’s decision to involve service agents early in the process – even getting them to carry out some of the testing.
“We knew that this would help them get familiar with the tool,” says Ewa. “It’s human nature to be resistant to change, initially, so it was important that we made the effort to help walk our agents through the process.”
And so, with relative speed and simplicity, Wizz Air integrated its 9 IT systems into Service Cloud, giving its service agents an easy-use single source of truth when dealing with customers.
“The scalability of Salesforce’s solution is going to be vital to us going forward. As we grow as a business, Service Cloud is going to help us continue to deliver a great service while keeping costs down.”
A better platform for communication
Using the customisable templates built into Service Cloud, Wizz Air’s agents are also able to communicate with customers in 12 different languages, while maintaining the standards expected of the airline.
“Our agents now have the tools they need to provide the same experience to our customers, wherever they are and whichever language they’re communicating in,” says Ewa. This functionality has helped smooth Wizz Air’s path into the Middle East, as its agents can now easily handle cases in Arabic.
And it isn’t just customers who Wizz Air’s agents are now able to communicate more easily with. “We use Chatter a lot,” says Ewa. “It makes it easy for our agents to communicate with each other. But also, it functions as a channel through which we can escalate and cascade information between agents and higher-ups.”
A better platform for team management
“We have a lean management team at Wizz Air – there are just a few people managing multiple contact centres,” says Andras. “We needed a scalable platform like Service Cloud that enables just one manager to manage an army of agents.”
Service Cloud has given Wizz Air’s service team supervisors shared visibility of their teams, enabling them to track agent activity, monitor case resolution time, and report on team performance “We have the same insight at the same time,” says Ewa. “We see the picture from different perspectives, depending on where we are in the communication chain, but we’re all seeing the same picture.”
This shared view of performance enables supervisors to get insight into how (and how successfully) customer interactions are being conducted. “We don’t have to collate data from different sources anymore,” continues Ewa. “The data is all on one platform now, so we can convert it into better services. We’re not just handling claims anymore – we’re managing them.”
Rather than operating as several disparate units, they’re all united around a single view of the customer journey. This is precisely why they’re able to deliver a great experience at scale to every customer.
More productive, efficient – and resilient
What that unified data has shown Wizz Air’s managers since Service Cloud was implemented is that the service agents are working more productively and efficiently – a trend the agents have noticed themselves.
“They were hesitant at first,” says Andras, “but within one or two weeks they were won over. They didn’t have to search in nine different platforms anymore – it was making their work a lot easier.”
Ewa concurs: “We’ve seen a wave of appreciation coming in from all our locations. The productivity has increased, and also our agents are telling us that because they can resolve simple cases more easily, they now have more time to focus on complex cases.”
For both agents and managers, Service Cloud has proved particularly invaluable during the COVID-19 period, when disruptions to flights have caused a huge rise in customer service cases.
“Many of our agents have had to work from home for much of this year,” says Ewa. “Having Service Cloud has meant that we’ve been able to keep our customer service up to the highest possible standard despite these conditions.”
A scalable platform for a more efficient future
With a flexible, scalable platform for customer service now in place, Ewa plans to introduce new channels of customer communication that will make things easier for customers and take pressure off Wizz Air’s customer service teams.
“We want to educate our customers in how to self-serve,“ says Ewa. “We also want them to be able to contact us through our app and website without having to look up contact details. And we’re looking into leveraging automation through the introduction of chat bots.”
The Service Cloud implementation project has shown Wizz Air that it can keep making improvements to its customer service while scaling up and saving money.
This has taken Andras by surprise – and bodes well for Wizz Air’s future.
“Customer Experience and driving cost down are often seen as rivals,” says Andras. “But we’re seeing that when we drive for efficiency, we’re also creating a better service for customers. What helps our customers also helps us.”
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