Challenge:

As a member of an airline continuous improvement team, we permanently search  and  develop improvements with significant financial or service value. When COVID-19 arrived  we suffered many disruptions, and so we had to find the way to adapt our operation and  processes.

Because of change in travel policies or flight schedule, passengers where worried about  they’re flight status. One of the things we perceived was that email notifications when a  flight was cancelled or modified were not clear enough for this situation, and current  contact points had not enough capacity due to high demand.

Selection:

To face this challenge we selected the visualization tool, because we believed the key was  to develop a share understanding of the situation. Contained by a variety of passenger  information needs and because of the different teams involved in the solution. By  visualization we can express what we perceive from the situation and that what are the  possible key elements. Also we can engage all the stakeholders by sensitizing them with  the passenger situation and the importance of the solution. Before starting we review the  Angela Myers video and took some benefits of the tool in order to use them when we  proposed to use it.

Application:

We developed the visualization on an incremental way, including stakeholders in different  steps. Starting first with our team, sketching on a big mural the elements we perceived  with a process logic and with illustrative information, as email examples. In the second  meeting we present this idea to the costumer experience team and refine some more  details.

With this done we accomplished to have a perfect product to sell the idea and  continuously adapt it as we go on including new stakeholders. And by having a clear idea  of the problem and watching how different elements worked together we discover some  insights.

Insight:

The narrow solution would have been to improve emails content and automatic response  in order to reduce contact center demand. But by sketching the different elements we  notice ecosystem influence of different teams of the company, and how they need to  operate as one. For instance we notice that as in COVID-19 we could flattened from curve  of contacts if we tunne email notifications in coordination with contact center saturation.  Also we discover that clarifying the passenger that was not urgent to get in touch, that the  booking will stand for several time and he could contact later when he have decided to  travel.

Approach:

I find in visualization a perfect tool to develop share understandings of a situation, also an  excellent way to present or encourage de idea. In the future we could try to use the tool  with all the stakeholders at the same time instead of incrementally, so we can wide the  opportunities instead of adapting an initial sketch.

