How Customer Focused Tech Keeps Airline's Revenue Aloft
Southwest Airlines' CIO describes how front- and back-end systems influence the customer experience and generate revenue.
Wed, October 07, 2009
CIO — Charlie Feld: Southwest has evolved into a big airline, but has used technology to keep the model simple for the customer and employees. Can you describe your approach?
Jan Marshall: We started in the 1970s as a three-city commuter airline. We've grown to the size of many of the biggest carriers, but we've stayed domestic and true to our model of a point-to-point versus a hub airline. We've continued to offer low fares, and the low fare model brings the IT cost structure into play.
Not only do we have to keep technology simple for our customers, we have to keep it simple for our employees because we look for highly-efficient transactions. But there's a tremendous amount of complexity at the back end. The way people buy tickets is very high-tech. Our website is visited by millions of people a month. We have built very sophisticated architectures to connect our customers to highly complex back-end systems that makes their interface intuitive and simple to navigate. We're also doing international code shares with other airlines, so we have to talk in their terms about our customers and their itineraries. We have to handle both things—the simple view to the customer and employee and communicating in a more traditional way to other airlines, through technology.
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We've tackled that through a service-oriented architecture that helps us integrate our front-end applications, such as refunds and exchanges, with our business transaction engines (such as our reservation system) using Web services and a set of common business rules. To our customers, though, it looks pretty straightforward.
We weren't necessarily early adopters of exciting new technology, but when we did deliver new technology, we did it in a way that was very simple to use and easy to understand. We were among the first adopters of digital technology with pilots for communicating messages from air to ground. With gate readers, we were the first to adopt barcode scanning on boarding passes instead of magnetic stripes on the back of the card stock.
Charlie Feld: How is Southwest able to invest in IT and remain a low-cost carrier?
Jan Marshall: It's hard to be an airline right now, between the recession and people wanting to stay home and companies wanting to manage their travel dollars. And the price of oil is going up or fluctuating dramatically.
