He made no mention of Matt Damon, Zendaya or special effects, but Jose Platero has taken one object lesson from this past summer’s The Odyssey and applied it Air Canada’s customer experience (CX) strategy.
Speaking last week at Toronto’s Nrth Festival (formerly known as Elevate), the airline’s director of product and design described an effort to standardize the way it develops web and mobile applications regardless of what the business needs in order to grow.
While the design system will be integral to Air Canada’s future digital enhancements, Platero suggested introducing it required an undercover approach.
Air Canada
“We were redesigning the Air Canada homepage, and that became the Trojan horse for the design system,” Platero told the Toronto-based crowd. “Then as we launched it, the difference between the homepage and the rest of the site became even more apparent.”
Demonstrating the strength of the design system’s user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) components on the homepage project has since allowed Platero and his team to get more funding to built it out even further, he said.
The impact on this work to customers may not be immediately obvious, but Platero said it will help the airline increase speed to market and keep its designers and developers focused on higher-order work. The increased demand for deploying AI, for example, has shown how badly a design system is needed.
“With (AI) everybody became a developer, and my design team started freaking out,” he recalled. “They were like, “Oh my God, we can’t keep up, and we can’t govern everybody. We can’t get everybody to be adhere to our standards.”
With the design system, Air Canada employees in areas like customer success who want to create an AI-powered experience would be able to go to a code repository to download what they need, alonw with the same documentation a dedicated designer or developer would have, Platero said.
None of this takes away expertise in what Air Canada passengers need and will truly value, however.
“The core skill they need, regardless, is to know what good looks like,” he said. “There is still a level of taste. We can only templatize some percentage of that.”
Platero did an experiment with the audience in which he asked how many of them had flown with Air Canada, and how many of them would have an opinion to share about their experience. In both cases, the vast majority of hands went up. The point was that Plantero and his team have all kinds of feedback coming in, so the question is how to filter what’s most important and that can be acted upon.
One example is trying to use AI to allow for more “human work,” he said.
“Our focus has really been around enabling, for example, the crews with technology to be able to do announcements, to do meal catering, to do everything they would normally have done in a paper-based fashion electronically very quickly,” he said. “That way they have more time to actually spend with the customers, talking them, telling them about the plane, telling them about the experience, just getting to know them.”