When most people book airline travel, they do it on line. But they have two options to obtain the boarding pass:
- They can print the boarding pass on their home or office printer.
- They can have the boarding pass sent to their smart phone.
According to Passenger Self Service, an on-line news site for self-service in travel, as of April 2016, 65% of airline passengers prefer a paper boarding pass over an electronic one.
Would some customers miss flights? Maybe.
Would there suddenly be very long lines of very frustrated customers at that airline's customer service desk at the airport? Probably.
Would some of the affected customers defect to another airline for future flights? Most likely.
Imposing a fully-digital process on a customer base that's not fully ready for it can cause pain and problems for the business and its customers. But that's what the New York Yankees did at the start of the 2016 baseball season.
According to a June 12 New York Times article by Billy Witz, "When the Yankees announced that they were overhauling their ticketing system this season — introducing mobile ticketing and no longer accepting print-at-home tickets — they said it was to enhance the fan experience.
"But that has hardly been the case for the fans camped out at the Yankee Stadium customer service window before each game, having been unable to get into the ballpark because of a problem with the tickets on their phones or turned away at the gate with tickets they printed at home or at work."
Here's the point:
Know your customer. Had the Yankees done some research on their fan base to understand the percentage of fans that were willing and able to go to an all-digital ticketing system, they would have realized that all fans were not ready.
Implement a transition plan.
Create a method to accommodate fans with varying digital appetites: For example, the Yankees could have taken a page from the play book of the many toll highways in and around New York: While transitioning to all-digital, some lanes still accepted cash. Many of the those highways have since become "Cashless," but only after customers had adequate time to transition.
Going digital drives down business operating costs, so the ROI can be attractive. But before jumping in 100%, it's critical to understand how the change will impact the customer experience, because frustrated customers can destroy that ROI pretty quickly.
When going digital, take time to understand your customers' appetite and ability to make the change with you, and execute accordingly.