3 Develop a winning customer proposition

We work hard to get close to our customers, listening to their needs and evolving our schedule and services to match. During the year, we aggregated all our customer data into a single location to give us a fast and intelligent view on emerging trends in customer travelling habits.

easyJet is leading the way within the airline industry on its use of social media to drive customer engagement and improve the customer experience – since its launch six months ago, @easyJetcare on Twitter has proactively assisted thousands of customers. easyJet also developed the first airline iPhone application in Europe, providing customers with real time data on the arrivals and departures for flights to and from our Swiss airports.

Ensuring that our customers arrive at their destination on time is key to delivery of a winning customer proposition, and at easyJet we continually measure on time performance. In the year, our on time performance (measured as percentage of flights arriving within 15 minutes of scheduled arrival time) improved from 75.4% to 79.5%.

The result? Continued strong appeal across the four key customer groups: business people; holidaymakers; customers visiting friends and relatives; and second home owners. In fact, nearly 90% of customers surveyed during the year would recommend easyJet to a friend.

The better we understand our customers, the more accurately we can target our communications. For example, with our new customer database in place, we are now able to tailor marketing emails to reflect the purchasing patterns and preferences of individual customers.

To support a renewed focus on business travel, we launched an online campaign targeted at finance directors. “Keep the FD happy” is an interactive video that takes a light-hearted look at how easyJet can save a company money in these tough times – but also highlights the serious business benefits of flying with easyJet, such as no weight restrictions on hand baggage and the ability to book through their preferred travel management channel. See the campaign at http://www.keepthefdhappy.com/

Our iconic Objects campaign continues to run across Europe, adapted to the needs of different markets. The campaign uses iconic orange “Objects” to represent the destinations to which we fly or the type of trip customers are taking. It delivers an energetic, exciting evocation of the travel possibilities we provide and a clear focus on the low price of the flight. Each easyJet campaign runs across a broad variety of both online and offline media.

Our public stance on climate change, such as signing the Copenhagen Communiqué, sends out an important message. Environmental matters are important to us, as they are to our customers. We have integrated a carbon calculator and offsetting facility into our online reservation system, with all investments made exclusively in United Nations-certified offset projects. Since the scheme was launched, easyJet customers have to date offset over 194 million Kg of CO₂.

As the UK’s most visited airline site, easyJet.com remains our primary distribution channel and in the last year we have commenced a major rebuild and refresh. We consulted with our customers, identifying what was and what was not liked about the existing site, and also looked at a wide range of top sites, both inside and outside the travel sector.

We have concentrated our initial energy on the most important section: the booking funnel, where five pages are responsible for delivering around £2 billion in revenue. The site is built on a more robust and scalable platform and is even easier to use, with a wider template and a basket that is visible at all times.

In a tough economic environment, we have increased our share of the business travel market in the past year. We recognise that the business travel segment, where revenue per seat can be around 20% higher than average, has different booking requirements to other markets. In particular, large corporates have strict travel management policies in place and manage their travel requirements through agents who often book through the industry’s Global Distribution Systems (GDS) such as Amadeus and Galileo.

Last year we made our schedule available via the GDS and other aggregator systems, so we are now listed in agents’ search results alongside other carriers. By the end of the year, around 15% of business seats were already being booked through this channel.

Business travellers, as well as leisure customers, are also benefiting from our winning customer experience initiatives. These include the ability to check in online up to 60 days before a flight, the opportunity to take an earlier flight for free, an inflight magazine that is as good a read as it is a promotional tool, and regionalised food and drink menus. Speedy Boarding remains an attractive customer proposition and we have been working hard to improve delivery across the network. In addition, this was the first full year for easyJet Plus!, an annual Speedy Boarding pass. With over 20,000 members across Europe, the card has quickly become a popular feature with easyJet’s frequent travellers.