As a recent study shows, buying decisions and customer loyalty are increasingly determined by the quality and performance of the digital services a brand can deliver: 54% of consumers place higher value on digital interactions than they place on physical interactions with brands. With its reputation for exceptional customer satisfaction and service, Alaska Airlines understands this. As a matter of fact, the company has been ranked “Highest in Customer Satisfaction Among Traditional Carriers in North America” in the J.D. Power North America Airline Satisfaction Study for the last 12 consecutive years. That’s impressive, especially considering it flies 46 million guests a year to more than 115 destinations with an average of 1,200 daily flights.
So how does Alaska continue to offer new and enhanced service offerings while continuing to uphold its already stellar customer service? Read on to find out.
1. Leveraging DevOps
Alaska Airlines knows that DevOps is vital to delivering reliable software and product enhancements faster. AppDynamics gives engineers, operations staff and developers the ability to see in real-time how the entire ecosystem is working and how applications are performing. Developers can make changes with confidence, see how those changes affect the system and customer experience, and iterate in real-time.
2. Embracing the cloud
Alaska Airlines leverages Microsoft Azure to enable a continuous delivery pipeline so it can make changes quickly and get new guest innovations out to customers faster than ever. With cloud capabilities like microservices and serverless functionality, Alaska Airlines also improves scalability and flexibility. With AppDynamics providing visibility into microservices and containers running in Azure, Alaska Airlines is certain its providing its guests with services that are healthy and reliable.
3. Understanding the business impact of technology
With end-to-end visibility into users’ experiences, Alaska Airlines executives can clearly see the business impact the company’s technology is having. With AppDynamics, they get data-driven insights to understand what their users are experiencing and what mean time to resolution and overall platform performance have on the bottom line. Additionally, having AppDynamics both on premise and in Azure helps them identify where they want to invest in their software and what else they may want to move to the cloud to drive customer satisfaction and continue to deliver world-class experiences.
4. Ensuring uptime
Any service outage on the Alaska Airlines platform is a problem that impacts users, call centers, customer service agents, and Alaska Airlines’ bottom line. With AppDynamics, they have full-stack, real-time visibility into their applications — from guest service to applications leveraged by pilots and flight attendants for flight mapping, safety and customer service — ensuring the business runs smoothly and users have exceptional experiences.
In the first year AppDynamics was deployed, Alaska Airlines reduced the number of Level 1 and 2 outages by 60%, and the company continues to sustain that. In addition, its mean time to resolution went from hours to less than 10 minutes. For a company that continually strives to make enhancements to its services, having a single source of truth and complete visibility into everything in a single pane of glass is key.
AppDynamics allows Alaska Airlines to continuously improve its digital experience platform so guests have the best possible travel experience, which translates to consumer trust and confidence. By reducing the number of incidents they have and how quickly they find them, Alaska Airlines can focus on building new things and innovating rather than spending time troubleshooting.
Read the full Alaska Airlines case study and watch the video here.