Most of us who have flown or fly regularly with Singapore Airlines rate it as one of the best – if not the best – airline in the world
The staffs are immaculately turned out, efficient, personal and are the epitomy of great in flight service quality.
The fleet is being refitted with a new interiors that again catapult Singapore Airways ahead of tis competition, spearheaded by being the first airline to adopt the A380. Everything then about Singapore Airlines is an understatement in efficiency, quality and customer service.
I don’t mind declaring it. I am a fan.
Or I was – right up until May 25th when they relaunched their website. And 3 weeks later it still doesn’t work. The Internet is full of blog posts and comments about how customers are fed up with lost bookings, incomplete transactions, inaccurate pricing let alone the experience that the KrisFlyer members are having to put up with.
Now I don’t know the full detail of the decision behind this fiasco, though I am told the guilty outsource partner is a mid size specialist eCommerce consultancy that took on the work as part of their plans to establish themselves in Asia. You couldn’t wish for a more high profile or better reference than Singapore Airlines, nor could you get the implementation so spectacularly wrong. I suspect there are a few people unexpectedly chatting to headhunters.
But there are lessons here for CEOs, CIOs and CMOs. First and foremost for many bsueinss – especially an airline – the web is no longer a marketing tool. It is a major customer touch point. It is an integral part of the brand experience and of course, it is nowadays one of, if not “the”, the primary revenue channels. It is the crown jewels and you don’t outsource the crown jewels.
If you do outsource it – and many companies simply don’t have the depth of experience or the familiarity with the latest software to do a project of this magnitude, then you have to outsource with a series of contingency and fallback plans in place,
My first question is did they need to make any changes anyway? Most of the comments on the web hint that the old site worked very well and customers were happy. I loved it . In fact a couple of times I used it as a case study in good user design principles, brand reinforcement because is was intuitive, simple and it worked.
Now we have a website that is slow, clunky, takes over 14 clicks to place an order, doesn’t render properly on all browsers and leaves you with too many error messages or incomplete actions for you to have any confidence in it.
The impact on Singapore Airlines reputation – on their brand promises of quality, reliability – is significant. I suspect the lost revenue both in terms of actual orders placed via the web (ie those that were successfully completed) as well as the hundreds or thousands of Business travellers now trying other airlines outweighs the cost of the Consultancy fees.
The basic principles of running a project of this magnitude seem to have been thrown out of the window. Any new functionality – let alone a relaunch- should be the result of customer research, insight and a strong business case. Once approved, as code begins to be delivered so there needs to be full functional and user acceptance testing way ahead of any launch.
Indeed with such a catastrophic launch there should have been an immediate rollback and the new site removed until it was fixed followed by some targeted marketing explaining the issues, and what was being done about it.
So who is to blame? Well, sadly both the consultancy undertaking the work – who clearly bit of more than they could chew – and the Airline CIO (or the Executive accountable for the project) should probably be in the firing line. The former because the basic tenets of project management, testing and website launch appeared to have been ignored. The later because it seems that the programme lacked due diligence, robust RFP process or contingency plans. Worse still there has been little or no marketing activity to welcome back disgruntled customers or to keep frequent flyers abreast of the issues which is having a dilutive effect on Singapore Airline’s brand equity.
Together this smacks at ineptitude or complacency – I am not sure whether it is either or both.
It is such a shame because once you get on board – which is after all why we book our ticket – Singapore Airlines remains in a class of its own
