Small changes, big impacts

The seemingly small changes can have an outsized impact on a digital experience. Take look at how our Digital Trip Support team at Southwest Airlines recently improved our check in experience to give Customers more context to reduce travel anxiety. These behind the scenes changes don’t always get the fanfare, but they are oh so important.

Huge shoutout to this awesome Trip Support Team as they find ways to balance changing the big and small.  

After working to help launch our new Flight Credits Don’t Expire policy change, they pivoted to improve error messages, an often overlooked area that can drive Customer frustration as well as phone calls or queues at the airport.

The team improved our Too Early To Check In experience by offering our Customers more details about when to come back, and in what time zone, if accidentally attempting to check-in ahead of 24 hours before departure.  Departing out of a different time zone, or daylight savings changes, can sometimes cause confusion for a check in.  And it happens a lot! This error was shown over 44 million times a year as our check in process is so time sensitive. So we’re excited to improve it.

Continuing, the team explored our next largest error and improved our Wrong Name at Check In experience.  Prior to this change, Customers may have entered a valid confirmation number, but simply typo’d a name which would generate a non-specific error.  The team added more context to the error message to help Customers realize it could be a name issue and to reinforce what was entered to offer a a chance to double check.  Improving this experience that occurred over 2.5 million times a year.

Finally, the team identified an opportunity to help Customers that may have forgotten to check in until they are at the airport, or perhaps they did a last-minute ticket purchase or change.  Prior to this change we prevented digital check in up to 1 hour before scheduled departure time.  The team worked with our Airport teams and others to match our kiosk check in time limit of 20 minutes.  Making this change reduced the error by 75% and over 700 Customers a day now can check in between 60 and 20 minutes prior to departure.

Way to go to our Digital Trip Support for making these changes!