EasyJet 2015 Annual Report Download - page 16

12 easyJet plc Annual report and accounts 2015
Chief Executive’s review continued
2DRIVE DEMAND, CONVERSION
AND YIELDS
Alongside the quality of its network, easyJet is able to drive
profitable growth through its leading customer-focused
proposition. In particular we are driving increasing levels
of loyalty and attracting passengers through the quality
and innovation of our digital platform.
Leading customer offering
easyJet’s strong relationship with its customers continues
to develop, with passengers increasingly likely to travel
with easyJet again after previously taking an easyJet flight.
Increasing customer loyalty helps to create more sustainable
long-term revenue.
In the last year, 74% of our seats were booked by returning
customers, which is a six percentage point increase from 2010.
All easyJet markets have seen an increase in customer loyalty,
with France showing the biggest increase of 28% since 2011.
The strength of the relationship was best illustrated during the
very busy summer trading period, with approximately 80% of
passengers who flew with easyJet being returning customers.
As part of the 20th Anniversary celebrations easyJet announced
the launch of its new customer loyalty program. This aims to
recognise and retain our high value and loyal customers with
a scheme that makes travel with easyJet even easier. Very
different to legacy frequent flyer programs, which are highly
expensive and complex, we want to make the simple things easy
for our customers. The programme offers a range of benefits
such as free name changes, free booking changes and a low
price promise, all reinforced by a dedicated customer support
team. This is expected to be rolled out in early 2016.
Our combination of using primary airports in large economic
markets, alongside high frequencies and attractive flight timings,
also makes easyJet a logical choice for business passengers.
We are focused on providing a bespoke business offering
through distribution platforms, Travel Management Companies
and direct to small and medium sized enterprises. We signed
up 100 corporate customers during the year. Despite a strong
comparable benefit in 2014 due to the Air France strike, we
nevertheless continued to increase the business yield premium
during the year. Sales of business products performed well,
with a 58% increase in the sale of flexible business fares when
compared to 2014. Sales through Global Distribution Systems
grew by 32% in the year as easyJet continued to leverage its
relationships with the Travel Management Companies. Bookings
from corporate customers direct also went up by 30%.
easyJet continues to see opportunities to sell its business
product across Europe and we have recently strengthened
our corporate sales capability through a new market,
customer and industry structure.
Innovation and digital leadership
Our digital platform is a key point of differentiation with our
competitors. We believe that we have significant advantages in
the capability of our web platform, our Customer Relationship
Management (“CRM”) data and our mobile offering. During the
year we had over 500 million visits across all platforms, an 18%
increase in the last two years, and we grew web conversion by
13% over the same period.
Our CRM enables our customers to benefit from increasing levels
of personalisation across multiple channels, with examples such
as saved passport details, targeted marketing campaigns via
email and text message and bespoke offers from our affiliate
partners. The user experience has been further developed over
the year, with greater ease of interaction on the website and
mobile and optimised layouts and design.
We have put significant focus on the mobile offering over the
past two years, with an award-winning app that enables mobile
hosting through the airport, disruption notification live with the
ability to change flights, and saved personal data such as
payment details. We have seen very positive take-up of mobile
as the platform for seat sales, almost doubling as a percentage
over the last 12 months to over 8%.
The strength of this platform was recently demonstrated when
our summer 2016 season tickets went on sale. On the day we
were commanding 33% of all UK airline web traffic share. Across
all channels we had 2.6 million visits, up 30% on the prior year, of
which over 15% were on mobile. In the early moments we were
selling 800 seats per minute, rising to a peak when we were
selling out the equivalent of an A320 every seven seconds.
We will be investing substantially in our digital capability over
the next three years, as we continue to innovate and maintain
our leadership position in the sector. Our initial focus will be
on enhancing the digital customer interface, to be delivered
by summer 2016, followed by the development of support
systems that will lead to easyJet having the first fully-integrated
e-commerce platform in the airline industry. In the longer term
we are committing to the acceleration of our use of data science
to improve efficiency, increase revenue and drive greater
customer satisfaction.
The digital programme will offer increasing amounts of
personalisation, introducing a more relevant booking journey
based on previous behaviour to drive higher footfall, higher
conversion rates and higher attachment rates. It will also enable
greater self-management capability through the entire journey
chain, from booking to check-in, through the airport and in the
event of disruption.
We are subsequently building an e-commerce platform that will
give us a competitive advantage for the long term. Its primary
objective is to give us significantly better flexibility and capability
than we currently have, specifically around our ability to offer
customers bespoke, attractive options.
Lastly, we have started to explore ways to innovate in other
areas across the business. In June we showcased new
technology such as engineering drones and prognostics
software. Looking to the future, we are investing in research
around Artificial Intelligence to exploit the large amounts of
data generated by our operations.