American Airlines
Helping the world’s largest airline chart a route toward complete alignment
American Airlines is the largest airline in the world, offering nearly 6,700 flights each day with its regional partner — to 350 destinations in 50 different countries. The company has a complex history of mergers and acquisitions that have significantly influenced its culture, priorities, and methodologies for getting work done. One of those methodological changes at American took the shape of an initiative to become a more design-thinking-centric organization, which obviously isn't something that happens overnight. Drawn hosted members of American’s digital team to workshop the implementation of design thinking methodologies and generate greater brand alignment — and customer satisfaction.
Cultivating Empathy, Winning Loyalty
After American Airlines’ digital team adopted agile design thinking practices into their workflow, they found themselves in need of some help putting their new practices to use on the daily. Drawn hosted eight members of the AA pre-purchase digital design team for a workshop that demonstrated four different design thinking methodologies, including active listening, empathy training, Drawn’s own Back Porch Conversations, and Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). We used these four methods to walk them through a demonstrative process that offered some immediate insights about their company (brand, culture, and customers), and also applied them to American’s real-world problems and established the groundwork for adopting these new approaches into their everyday processes.
Humanizing the Data
While we are mindful to keep the thoughts that American shared with us strictly confidential, we can say that the situation in which the airline finds itself today is shared by most sizable organizations with whom we work — namely, they struggle with organizational alignment. The digital team is siloed from their project teams, to whom initiatives are handed down. Those initiatives were drafted with a close eye on product & loss statements (P&Ls), but not too much first-hand engagement with customers — or pilots, crew, or mechanics. Throw in an advertising agency with its own ideas for the company’s image and you've got a whole lot of parts that don't all fit together very well. We find this to be a very common reality.
Traveling Toward a Better Experience
A half-million people fly American Airlines every day, but how well does the airline know these customers? We helped them become better acquainted by thoroughly examining customers’ journeys — How do they pack? What do they think about on the way to the plane? What do they do when they land? This live exercise with real travelers provided more context to the airline and developed greater empathy in thinking about their customers’ travel experience. And what we discovered allowed us to begin journey mapping, which helped the digital team understand how their role fits into the larger AA customer journey, ultimately improving customer satisfaction.
Thinking Outside the App
We find design thinking to be a valuable approach to solving problems and building a meaningful brand, but we also place a premium on alignment because a company without alignment becomes a big box of parts rather than a well-oiled machine. To utilize design thinking efficiently, it needs to find context within an organizational system that is working toward a consistent goal.
Bringing the Learnings Home
Of all the insights that American Airlines said that they gained from our workshop, their newly improved ability to recognize how their team is a portion of this much larger whole (which needs to be functioning as a cohesive unit) was at the top of the list. They discovered that they need to spend more time with customers to make sure that they are designing solutions with the right jobs to be done, to gain perspective on how their team fits into the whole flying experience, how their role affects the company’s overall reality, and how they can help establish better connecting tissue between the various parts with which they work.
