united.com Customer Service Section

Define

In 2005, United Air Lines, the nation’s largest airline, was receiving millions of customer service calls every month – many of which were repeat requests to the same problem! The following business goals were established:

• significantly lower operational costs
• while improving the quality of customer service

Discovery

Billups Design introduced the ROI of Social CRM to UAL, a concept that our client and it’s software partner were not yet aware of. Social CRM expands how a customer’s value is measured so that, in addition to Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Referral Value is quantified, measured and optimized.

With Billups experience with enterprise knowledge base (KB) software, we proposed that UAL’s software and UX could recommend answers to common questions and most requests could be handled without email or calls.

UAL’s off-shore software partner had difficult-to-implement, inflexible software and virtually nonexistent collaborative skills which presented unique challenges to design an effective solution.

Since their software was unable to detect positive and negative feedback, we recommended “feedback” forms that would communicate with UAL reps without promising a response. This solution would allow UAL to collect all types of feedback and utilize it to post up relevant FAQs.

Design

Billups improved the existing UAL Customer Service user experience by introducing usability testing, information architecture and interface design to a team of business people and software developers.

The UAL technology team was overburdened with other projects, so we successful created and maintained a hosted email service on Billups servers to accommodate 500k monthly emails for the first year.

And Billups managed and integrated KB software into existing UAL systems, including an elaborate system of Q&A geared toward UAL’s specific problems and their respective answers. In addition, we created a system of email routing to key business units (e.g. baggage, tickets, award travel, check-in, international, etc.) and their specific rules.

Delivery