United’s Voice of the Customer Program Vital to Great Customer Experience

United customer experienceUnited Airlines listened to its customers earlier this year before it changed its frequent-flier loyalty program and award miles based on ticket price rather than distance flown. The major shift in the loyalty program will take effect on March 1, 2015. United’s Voice of the Customer program is vital in providing a first-class customer experience.

Sue Sabow, Managing Director Customer Experience and Corporate Strategy for United, told Loyalty360 that the Voice of the Customer program focuses specifically on providing actionable customer insights to teams that are responsible for delivering customer service and products across the company.

“Every day we compile survey results to generate a customer satisfaction score, which, along with our monthly customer satisfaction targets, encourages continuous improvement,” Sabow explained. “We use those scores as well as written feedback to identify what we do well and where we can improve. We match survey results to operational factors such as on-time performance, airport locations, aircraft type, class of service, etc., in order to uncover trends and pinpoint opportunities for longer-term improvements.”

For a massive customer service company like United, Sabow said its biggest risks and opportunities are connected to ensuring efficient execution to a high standard across all aspects of the customer journey.

“While this requires a lot of work to ensure all stakeholders are aligned to the strategic goals, this is also highly valuable and rewarding work that every one of us can contribute to in order to deliver a high quality end-to-end experience that our employees are proud to call their own, and that our customers value time and time again as they choose to fly with us,” she explained.

At United, Sabow said customer experience is defined as the sum of all key touch-points, interactions, and, ultimately, the relationship that a customer has with the airline.

“United has more than 85,000 dedicated employees across the world,” Sabow said. “While not every single person interacts United Customer Experiencewith or directly influences a customer’s experience, we have a shared focus across the company to meet or exceed our customers’ expectations, whether it’s on the ground, in the air, or anywhere in between. We strive to ensure that the transition from one phase to the next in the customer journey is as seamless as possible.”

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