Is Your Business Soaring? How British Airways Personalized the Customer Journey

The world becomes more interconnected every day. Today’s customers expect personalized experiences and proactive service from brands. British Airways understands this; as a global airline, they have put personalization at the heart of their business strategy. But personalization is almost always a massive undertaking. It requires not only the technology to harness and utilize customer data but also organizational alignment across teams and channels. The question remained; how could British Airways take 400,000,000 customer interactions per year and personalize them?

The first step was a shift in how they thought about customer interactions:

“We needed to move from a mindset where we created offers based on commercial need and pushed them to customers, to designing personalized interactions based on customer need. We needed to have a mindset where we could listen to what our customers were doing, the signals that they were sending us, and respond. Really moving to an always-on customer conversation.” - Jenny Lake, Global Customer Strategy and Communications Manager at British Airways

Personalization is next to impossible when channels are siloed, each with their own data and business objectives. In order to create a unified customer experience across all channels, customer data needed to be centralized. British Airways partnered with Pega and started on their personalization journey by building a single customer view. The result? They are now able to uniquely identify over 100,000,000 customers and personalize to over 50,000,000 of them.

By investing in Pega’s next-best-action technology, British Airways was able to deliver truly omnichannel personalized experiences, including the website, email, mobile, the call-center and onboard their aircrafts.

“We’re very close to delivering personalization as a true hallmark of our brand promise, which is to fly, to serve.” - Rob Thorne, Customer Decisioning & Data Governance Manager, British Airways