[Music] Ever felt like the world is moving too fast that is simply not enough time between clearing your inbox and joining the next team's call to give deep, meaningful thought to the technologies that are about to transform your aviation operation? Well, help us at hand with this new future travel experience podcast, proud to be part of the Apex family. My name is Max Cosney, I'm the new MD at FTE and this pod is designed as a community support group for all you busy aviation professionals feeling bamboozled by the searing pace of change. Tune in for a collaborative and friendly forum where we'll guide you on the innovations that are too important to ignore. Each episode, I'll be interviewing aviation chiefs who've blazed a trail with new technology. We'll get behind the hype to explore the very human challenges standing in the way of successful implementation. What leadership traits are essential to drive change? Is AI overrated? And how do we win that all important employee buy-in for change? You can listen on your way to work while traveling to an Apex FTE event or even while walking your dog, whatever your preference, you'll uncover a wealth of collaboration, best practice and creative thinking. Enjoy. Hello and welcome to the episode where we're lame to surprise and delight you in honor of our exclusive guest, Yuhar Yevenon. Yuhar is chief customer officer and executive vice president at Virgin Atlantic. He's responsible for delivering outstanding customer care across the airline's fleet. On today's episode, Yuhar will talk to us about an ethos where if a crew member makes a mistake, the very last thing they encourage to do is to hide or to refer back to the customer service's department back home. Instead, crew are encouraged to be proactive, be honest, to own the mistake and to get to know their customer and make amends. Yuhar reveals how that's the secret of developing life-long customer loyalty. Yuhar has just been announced as our exclusive keynote speaker at FTE's EMEA and Silia and Retailing events taking place in Dublin. So if you like today's conversation, you enjoy the philosophy that Yuhar talks about, then you'll learn an awful lot more by joining us there in Dublin in just under two weeks' time. Yuhar will launch the event with a keynote furthering on today's conversation of delivering outstanding customer care at 9/10 on the 10th of June. Hurry, get yourself registered, ladies and gents and I look forward to seeing you there. In the meantime, please Yuhar and enjoy the show. Good afternoon and welcome to the podcast Yuhar. Thanks, nice to be here Max. Fantastic to have you. Yuhar, hot for press from a future travel experience this morning. We've with great delight announced that you will be a keynote at our EMEA conference, Silia and Retailing in Dublin. Really looking forward to your session. The title of which is the future of the most loved customer experience. Can you tell our listeners a bit more about that title, what you'll cover and what we'll learn? Yes, and of course we've been proud to be the best airline in Europe at these awards for a number of years now. And what it's been exciting is really how do we bring together the face-to-face customer experience with the physical product. So my goal for the Dublin session is to really try to translate the key learnings and the key successes that we've had to date into the future. And of course future leaning, what the opportunities are both in terms of combining technology, combining that unique virgin flair that we have when customers fly with us and how will that mix evolve over time when we go into the future. So that is still working progress but I'm promising a good session. Well, we're still two weeks. We all know speakers like yourself. The two weeks is plenty of time. So we can build it out from here but we are looking forward to it. And interestingly I noted that within the synopsis we talk about that virgin-served, virgin Atlantic service delivered by people enabled by technology. In that order, I mean because we are, as a brand as well FTE as perhaps prone to this, we are all looking at AI and we're obsessing about AI but delivered by people was interesting comment there. Yeah, because I think the key question is that what will be the future makes of technology enablement versus the human touch and the human face facing counter. And we believe that the technology obviously should make the customer interaction much more seamless, much more hassle free which will then actually give us more time, the more face to face time or over voice or whichever means customer wants to communicate with us or interact with us that we have more actually time and better quality time to bring that virgin flair and the virgin experience to the customer. So technology is there to enable that. Of course, in certain instances potentially eliminate the interaction because customers can solve and get the answers without talking to your human. But I firmly believe that there is that human plus dimension where where technology and AI agent together with the human can really bring something unique together. And then we used our humans, our virgin virgin amazing start members to really elevate that and bring something unique because at the end of the day, we all end up using the similar technology over time. And we end up quite often use utilizing similar technology on board as well, if we think from an on board on board space, how do we differentiate, how do we stand out. And I don't believe on a steady state, the seat necessarily will be the one because everybody will be catching up with their seats or some of the other elements. It is really the human interaction that can really stand out. And that's something that is always being in our DNA for 42 years to date. And we aim to definitely do that and spice it up even more, going forward. So actually the technology, like you say, enables us in power, the staff a little bit more time to execute those human touches, the warmth of the future examples you have of what innovative new features that might enable. I mean, one is what we already launched is the AI conscious years, which we now have fully integrated into our new app, the app that we launched in back in March. And actually, we were also the first airline to launch our new app in chat GPT. So it's now integrated within the platform. We were the first airline to do that. And now when we obviously evolved with the technology that will, we hopefully will bring that on board soon as well. We are in a process of now installing, installing on all our aircraft. We have we have progressed very well now with the ever 350s. And we will have all aircraft done by probably by mid next year. So that will be definitely a game changer for our customers, because we will be probably the first airline really to, in especially in Northern Lancia, to have all aircraft installing. So that gives that consistency to customers. And also, it enables our staff members to have much more insight on the customer as well. And we are able to be online throughout the journey. And regardless what happens if it's disruption or in the journey or special birthday that we happen to know that you might have, it is really how do we elevate that experience and give that bit of extra that technology enables us to do in an in-ear seamless way. So it might be that's a good, perhaps a good example you touch on there, but where you're, it's a passenger's birthday, you know, having the technology flag that empower these staff and you're able to then go and add that kind of personal touch. Happy birthday to you, do you cake those sort of little flourishes that I guess you won't get anywhere else? Yeah, and I mean, it's surprising. We meet a few times a year without top tier customers and we ask, why do they fly with us? And it's surprisingly many. These are, you know, entrepreneurs high-flying executives. And when you ask them, what is the reason? And it's actually quite often, these are the reasons they list us, why they fly with us, because they feel that we actually care, we truly care, which is great to see because I'm great to hear because that is really something that, you know, we can stand out. We're not one of those airlines that sort of standardize a five-star luxury experience. We are there as human beings as individuals and we encourage our crew members for example to be themselves and be be their own personality. We are not sticking to a hard-coded procedural statement that they need to make on board, which many airlines decide to do we want to be different and we've always been different. And if there's any other insights either, either customer has given us before or, or for example, our clubhouse at the airport has spoken to the customer, there's something that they want to share that the cabin crew members, or that we can sort of surprise and delight again on board. Is that seamlessness of communication between various team members as well that can really stand out, and especially makes it feel authentic? Now definitely, remember why it comes to actually
in your customer feedback and talking about customer feedback. Can you tell us a little bit more about the importance of Net Promoter Schools, MPS, in assessing customer satisfaction at version of LanTik? And then perhaps if you go on in your answers then talk about how you use that data to drive revenue maximization. Yes, we are almost, say that we obsessed about MPS. We are tracking it obviously on every single flight, every single day. Just to acknowledge someone landed from planets organ, I've never heard of MPS. So if you give us some context here, please as well. Yes, we obviously asked people to answer our surveys or always after flight. We track various elements, various touch points in the journey, everything from you know booking, booking, check in, boarding, lounge, and various in flight elements. And then people rank us and keep us scoring, which we then obviously compile, compare against various aircraft types, we compare against different customer profiles or reasons to travel. Obviously measured in every single route and we start building patterns on where do we have either exceeded expectations or we are also in some cases then not delivering as per customer expectations. So we use that internally very much as a scoring mechanism on how well we are doing and where do we need to focus on. And it's surprisingly a big variation between different type of routes as well that some customers are much more, some routes, customers are much more critical than others. And that is really where we need to be then able to try to adjust as much as we can. And the great advantage of us being a boutique size airline is that we have the capability to also modify and adjust our service concepts on route level. So you know we will have very different meal concepts on India versus South Korea or any other routes and how do we then adjust the timing of the meal concepts depending on how the local eating habits are depending on time of the day. And it's really and we very quick to then adjust if we see that the reaction is not as good as we hope for. So then we aim to tackle it straight away especially with the new route if we enter a market like South Korea which we entered now in late March. It's again a new market for us where we need to local adjust our local offer and make sure that we are as relevant as we can both for South Korean and for British audiences. And that's exciting. That's what motivates our team as well and our our camping crew always extremely involved as well giving us feedback and how do we improve. And that's really I would say the secret sauce for the Atlantic that we are we are very hands-on and even our frontline staff they sort of they're part of the family they feel like they are entrepreneurs as well you know that it's their business too so they are very quick to then keep us inside on what works and what doesn't work equally well. That sounds really interesting. So if if I've interpreted correctly you will get a specific trend on a particular route in feedback to whether it's the inflight time and all the the food that allows you to pinpoint and make improvements specifically for that route that you're serving absolutely. It's bomb very personally to the customer exactly. And then obviously we aim to be as quick as we can as well on doing corrective actions so we we do see that if there is something might happen on an outbound flight that we try to sort of recover as much we can on the return. So we use we use this insight very actively to to try to mitigate if there's any service gaps or anything that we've we've experienced. But we love to surprise in delight that's really out of the and it's quite often small things it could be a handwritten note to our customer or also acknowledging what happened on the way out if we can correct it somehow on the way back and that's something that we're really aiming targeting to do as our level standard standard that we offer especially in the premium campaigns but equally in economy it could be that how do we take care of our family yes we've been on the Florida holiday or anything like that so it's really about adjusting adjusting yourself and your concept and your offer to the customer in question and that's the beauty of an airline like Virgin Atlantic which is smaller in size, put the size that gives us that leverage and opportunity to customize more. What's the most surprising thing you've uncovered in the MPS feedback? Were you really sat back with what God didn't expect to find that out? Sometimes actually if the if a service recovery is done very well customer strength is very high that they they acknowledge that you know delays or cancellations things can happen in the industry where we operate but they value highly the way that we then course correct and especially if it's immediate correction or immediate action that surprises people and quite often people actually might in some cases rank you higher after a service failure because when they when they see that the company has taken it seriously. So that honesty and the event of a failure? Yeah, yeah surprise and delight in a way that yes something happened but we corrected it and we apologized and we made it you we made you feel special and can you talk to us about how you ally that to MPS and the feedback to revenue generation around things like duty free sales and ancillary items please. Yes, so of course certain items that we we either offer in as part of the ticket price in some ironcillaries. I'm firmly believer of ancillaries are there to improve your journey and it gives you options to choose. We have still long way to go on the ancillary side we haven't really commercialized some of the elements like in flight space enough and that's something that I'm I'm challenging my my new team on that and how do we make sure that we add services or products to customers that people are happy to pay for extra because again we only we only operate on long-haul sectors so customers are with us at least six to seven hours and it's quite if you think about in what other business you sort of are locked in into your your world for six seven hours or twelve twelve to fourteen hours is a unique opportunity to take care of the customer and really make them feel special and in some cases you're happy to pay extra doing that experience to get something better than what you might have got for free or as part of the ticket price so it's really about how do we integrate more products and more services to your experience which will of course increase the revenue for us and share a wallet from an airline perspective but it's value adding for the customers itself. Make sure you register today to join us at apex future travel experience EMMA in 2026 on the nights of the 11th of June with Dublin. This is the event is a definitive gathering for airlines airports and technology leaders who want to drive digital transformation customer experience and operational innovation at scale. The event is located with FTE and Sillery and Retailer where we bring together airports airlines retailers and technology partners to unlock next generation revenue opportunities at scale. Sign up go to futuretravelexperience.com or you can email me
[email protected] for more information. If you want to discover great content outstanding creativity and strong collaboration amongst your peers and make a date with Dublin this June. I'll see you there. How do you get behind some of the metrics of a scorer mechanism like MPS to find the reasons why a customer has given that answer because from memory and I've used the system before you get detractors advocates because you're a huge level of insight and scope as to what people think but the why sometimes it's harder to uncover how do you dig deeper? It's definitely the like I said earlier the in case of service failures where we see that there always to be detractors but if we can tackle it and we can actually potentially even do a course correction on the way back. We have one we have one over some customers for life by by actually surprising and showing that we care and showing that we take an immediate action so it can be sometimes a detractor can be a future success factor if we manage them in a right way. Of course it's not always easy it's not always walking apart and we don't always succeed but that is our ambition to be the best best in Europe which we've been obviously awarded for for a few times known in a row and we are targeting to maintain that role as being the best airline overall airline in Europe because we are different we are unique in a virgin way and people love to fly with us even even from markets where we are no less a brand necessarily it's always that sort of excitement when people into virgin aircraft. Yes and I love that as you credit is down to the team and you mentioned that they they're very old they feel they are entrepreneurs they feel a part of the brand how do you kind of recruit and develop that mindset as a business.
I would say that definitely we invest more than probably many other companies in the actual recruiting process. So we have a cabin crew or for airport staff, but especially cabin crew, we have a number of steps that you need to go through. A lot of crew, also crew interviews, various assessments with our colleagues. And besides the sort of technical skills of a job, it's more and more focused on the personality that how do we make sure that the person's with diverse backgrounds and diverse profiles, we chart the sort of through ambassadors of Virgin Atlantic. So we spend a lot of time on that to make sure that we have a right fit. And then the second thing is just to make sure that we help them then in the journey when they actually join us and making sure that we make them feel special as well. And we empower them to be themselves and being able to make decisions on board, especially so that we don't always sort of leave the course correction or the service recovery to the customer relations team afterwards that we try to empower our people as much as we can to take action and take the ownership straight away. So you've seen the leadership themselves, if you have something happen, you've got an idea of how to resolve it and take that one by the reins and look to resolve it on board. Yes, so the crew teams are empowered to do that and then obviously if there's something that they feel that they were unable to do, so they're quite often they then give the crown teams advice or feedback that this and this customer is now in Las Vegas or wherever it might be, that is there's something we could do on the way back when they fly back to try to course correct them. So that is one sort of quite sort of overarching theme that quite often people who work for a journalistic, they almost like entrepreneurs at heart because they want to make sure that we succeed and we can get better. And quite many people also in our club houses, in our launches, our customers say that you can really feel that the customers, the staff actually want to work there and they actually enjoy being in the shift instead of waiting to shift to end and you can really feel the difference that the crew and the staff teams have been there. It's their favourite place of work and you can feel it. And yeah, which is a great selling point now set for the business, the customers on board. He mentioned you had the new app which I think is developed within chat GPT if I'm correct, please correct me if I'm not. So tell us a bit more on what are the KPIs by which you will assess how effective that's been. So one is of course the over ratings in the app store so we are very proud that we are in our after after only two months now so we have scoring a 4.5 in the Apple world which is very high for considering how new the app is. The way that it was designed it was really designed to be a travel companion so it is there to help you not only plan your journey but then when you want to take it or port your holiday with version anti holidays. It is there to guide you throughout the process and give you incremental offers. We are continuously further of course improving the app. We will have to full holidays integration now very soon this spring and then we will subsequently then develop it going forward. In Club our free conflite program is really in the heart of the design to make sure that customers would start using the app more often not only when they travel but also for other means but it is a continuous iteration, it is a continuous improvement but it is there to be a travel companion and obviously the AI conch ears is there to make it easier. Excellent stuff. It is your business to delight the customer, surprise and delight but in our world and all worlds that there are always going to plan. I have interest to know for your perspective as a customer what is your biggest frustration with the aviation industry that we work in? I think it is still the overall value chain which customers have to go through and of course equally we need to go through. There is still a lot of friction between various stakeholders. It might be airports or ads or if you control or some of the service providers. I think sometimes you think it is a miracle that every flight actually gets actually away on time or lands on time because there are so many different service providers in the journey and of course not all elements of the experience are equally competitive that some are monopolis etc which have higher cost or lower service levels. So it is the complexity of the industry which is a frustration but equally that is the reality of the industry and that makes it also very interesting because you have various stakeholders you need to deal with and our goal is to make sure that the customer doesn't actually know the difference. The customer shouldn't need to know for whom any employee that you come across is working for. That is uninteresting for the customer. So how do we make sure that when people are on a version of the journey they feel that a version of an experience end to end and that is really the service design principle that we have regardless where you are. Of course it is always the easiest in your biggest airports like in our case he throw a man's sister where we have more of our own people throughout the journey but we need to then be able to trust our service providers at the destination to deliver that version experience regardless where you are. How do you think we might remedy it as an industry that fragmentation? I think one thing is that we again going back to people that we need to take care of those people that work for us and that is why it is increasingly important for us as well when we talk to our subcontractors and our service providers that that sort of version flare flows through. Of course that does require sort of regularly business reviews etc to make sure that we can deliver it but the MPS going back to the MPS and the voice of a customer that is really the key vehicle for us to track how are the various airports delivering the service that they are contracted to do and if we see any deviations from the norm that is something that we aim to tackle straight away. So remember that we are playing on the same team right for the one customer who passes through us at the end of the day. What is your story you are? How did you first become excited and interested in aviation and get involved with industry? Yes so my first aviation job was actually in London back in 1998 while I was studying university in London I worked in a call centre for SCS Canadian Airlines A Heathrow so that was my part time job and I would claim that that was probably the best school you can have to enter the aviation industry to work in a call centre so you came across all possible inquiries, all possible issues and opportunities to solve and more generically I have always been interested in travel. Yes. I didn't travel myself sort of with the plane before I was 15 I think I was 15 when I flew first time on a plane. So it's always been that sort of excitement about seeing the world and that sort of triggers that excitement which I can still feel even after all these years. Indeed. Can you recall some of the inquiries you got back in that job at the call centre? I say some weird and wonderful calls I imagine. You know you can raise anything on what kind of animals you can bring on board or any other sort of exceptions or hold the plane I'm only one hour away from the airport type of comments can be anything anything anything ranging from all possible aspects of life. And you of course heard a lot of life stories as well people have you know travel is emotional is emotional journey for many people there's a lot of reasons why people travel. Some are happy, some are less happy and some people are or it's as fascinating to to share this story why they're traveling so it is there's always a new story waiting behind the corner. Indeed there'll be some younger listeners thinking what do you mean they can just stick into a search engine or chat GPT yeah used to call people up and ask this question and then back and back and back then and what lessons do you look to learn and keep your eye out for from other industries because you do experience in life you leave the office tonight the job and you will experience life as a customer or supermarkets or card dealerships whatever it is we all go through that flip so what do you do you look out for things and what kind of ideas have you picked up on from other industries. I think one industry where which from which airlines should learn more and especially again technology should make it easier is hospitality hotels more high end restaurants how do we how do we bring elements of that experience to the aircraft or how do we bring that experience to the launchers because
In some cases, I think it's just bad excuse that often we say in the industry that you can't do that in an aircraft environment or you can't produce that in a mass production way, it must still be impersonalized. So I think for that reason, I think the hotel industry and restaurant hospitality in general, there's a lot we can learn. Yes, there are things that are more difficult in an aircraft environment, but I think it can be also a bit of an excuse to say that you can't do that in an aircraft. And therefore, I think it's great that the aviation industry is now more diverse in terms of having those players who have taken the ball steps to do things differently. I think it's the raises the bar for everyone. What do you think the customers of tomorrow are going to want from their passenger journey, you know, I think my kids, but there's generations coming through totally different expectations and normalities to what I might think. How do you say it change in? Probably the biggest difference is that customers in the future will expect that you know them and you expect them to know what you need. So that goes back to the data and how do we utilize and translate a data point into an insight and how do we make sure that we can improve? So that's one. And I think if we look at what the younger generations are interested in today, it is about experiences. It could be even in destinations that you really want to get rid of your mobile phone. You really want to detox and take care of your wellbeing. So wellbeing is an interesting topic as well that what could allies do more in that space? Because I wouldn't say that any ally has really cracked the code on how to, good we make customer feel better at the end of the fly versus how they felt before they boarded the aircraft. That is, it's a difficult quote to crack, but it's something that I think a lot to sit on as an ambition that customer actually are there more energized or motivated by the times they leave the aircraft than when they entered. And again, technology getting that opportunity to pause, pause and reflect when you're in the plane. At least I can say about myself that I love being in the plane and not necessarily speaking to anyone because that gives me time to think and reflect because you get bit of me time, so to speak. And how do we make that as easy as possible for the customer that this should be our journey? And how do you stay in track with some of those trends as a business? Are you kind of leading research groups or how do you keep you here to the ground, I guess, is where I'm coming from and my question? Yeah, we do use customer focus groups quite a lot. And increasingly we go to being quite specific on a certain theme just to make sure that we capture and have enough time. But of course AI, we need to also remember that AI is a great tool as well to try to capture some of those trends. But we still believe that that human touch is needed and therefore we do prefer having those human focus groups as well to make sure that we get the right insight which hopefully validates the direction that we are taking the line to. And also what is inspiring for us is of course our owners both Delta, but especially also Sir Richard Prenson and his children that they raise the bar for us. They challenge the conventions and they want to be the one who sort of cheer us but also challenge us to be unapologetically virgin and really standing out from the crowded space of aviation today. And that's an exciting mission to have that we can really stand out. What do you find most enjoyable about the job? It is when you see the virgin aircraft, when you actually go to the airport, you see the people's faces when they enter the plane, you see our crew ready for the flight and you see that sort of excitement. And you see that excitement every single time that motivates me to make our service even better because these are big moments in people's lives, could be a leisure trip or could be a business trip but there's usually a good reason why people travel and how can we make that even better or more exciting. That's our goal. Indeed. What would be your advice to our listeners on how to cope when it goes wrong? Because it does go wrong and you aren't expected to happen, we will experience it. How do you advise people to react when the brakes do not go their way and there is an angry customer who's pretty annoyed about something? I think one is that you need to tackle it straight on and try to solve it as quickly as you can and that is our job to give our from-line staff the both of technological but also the empowerment to try to course correct and really focusing on that service recovery because like I said earlier, it can actually turn into even more loyal customer when you treat a irregularity in a positive way. Yes, it's to be imporactive. I think that and being frank and honest about what happened instead of coming out with any generic excuses. I think that that is what annoys people most. Again, we aim to do that in a way where people feel that we care. What else can we expect from yourself and Virgin Atlantic in the coming year? This is all still, you know, you moved into the role in January, I believe, so it's still very fresh. Yes, we definitely are further investing in our club houses, our launches. We are entering a significant retrofit program for our 787 aircraft. We have the Starlink implementation this year. We actively then exploring how can we elevate the InFlight experience, both either through elements that we give for free, but especially how can we commercialize some of the service elements, incremental service elements going forward. We believe that we should widen our loyalty ecosystem so we have a lot of great stuff on the loyalty front. Again, teaming up with our SkyTeam airline partners across the globe, making sure that we can bring customers that seamless experience with the Virgin Flair when they fly with us and really making sure that we're there as human beings because at the end of the day we all want and need that human interaction. Make it feel special. Exactly. We're looking forward to more of that human interaction with yourself and others and the EMEA event and Antelina Retetti in a couple of weeks. Thank you so much for your time and insight on the podcast. I want to get a good NPS score from you because I know you've got another meeting. I've better finish this up here and make sure you get away to that one on time. Any final thoughts or reflections or anything else you would want to flag with our audience? Head of that session in a few weeks. Not to say that come with an open mind. We're luck being the most love travel company and our goal is to remain so and to delight you going forward. Thank you. You're really excited to hear the full session and really appreciate your time and thank you. Thank you, Max.
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