Air India - brand & experience refresh

From national institution to national inspiration

Challenge

Air India has been the pride of the nation since its inception by JRD Tata in 1932. The company was nationalised in 1953, and recently bought back by the Tata group after 70 years of state ownership. The ambition? redefine the essence of a world-class airline with a distinctively Indian touch, setting a new standard for excellence.  My challenge was working with Air India’s leadership to use the new brand platform to inform how the airline should operator day-to-day, and help define the impact this would have on passengers and staff alike.

Approach

The brand experience has been redefined to reflect quintessential Indian hospitality through every stage of the customer journey. After defining a series of experience principles, I helped the business put these into practise by facilitating a workshop event that used them to reimagine employee behaviour throughout the different departments - and then to explore how these new behaviours might impact the end-to-end customer journey.

Outcome

With over 50 individual improvements to the customer journey identified, we synthesized them into four key opportunity areas, linked by a singular experience strategy to be ‘The Best of Quintessential Indian Hospitality’.

Each idea was ranked against an Effort vs Impact matrix to give a simple weighting of each idea and added to our Innovation backlog. The ideas have also been used to inform Air India’s forthcoming service updates.