Click and fly lifts Freedom

Airlines recognise the cheapest way to sell a ticket is over the internet, but how can they encourage customers to click right through to a purchase?

Budget airline Freedom Air found part of the answer was online chat.

Information chief Gary Walker said he wanted to stop shopping cart spillage, where people terminate a session so they can ring the call centre for more information.

"From my statistics on the net I could see I was losing sales opportunities.

"People were coming to the net during business hours but not booking, then making phone bookings after hours," Walker said.

"It was clear they were trying to book at work, but they did not want their peers to know they were making phone calls in office time for personal holidays."

Freedom Air signed up for a hosted customer management system from United States vendor RightNow.

In the week-long implementation, local agent Datamail fed Freedom Air's frequently asked questions into RightMail and added an email link and a live chat feature.
In December, the first full month of use, 9103 people used the email function. Before sending the message, RightNow popped up a window giving a list of possible answers from the knowledge base.

More than 8000 people were satisfied with the answer and continued with the transaction. Only 966 sent their questions, which were answered within four hours.

Another 413 people with curly questions were already in the middle of a session and used the live chat button to get an immediate answer.

"If someone wants to know where they can get their old dunger of a 2.7m surfboard on to the plane, we can give them an answer," Walker said.

In January, Freedom ran a $99 special - something which in the past meant doubling the size of the call centre with casual staff.

Walker said this time only 100 extra calls made it all the way to the call centre.

"I took out 15 per cent of my call centre in the first month. I will be able to cover the $18,000 cost of the system with one full-time equivalent staff member.

"That return on investment doesn't include the savings I am making on having fewer 0800 calls and the revenue boost from cutting down spillage," Walker said.

"People talk about turnkey solutions.

"To get a product like this up and running in a week and then surpassing expectations and covering its costs within months - I have been in the industry 35 years and never seen that."

Taking off

* Freedom Air was losing online bookings as intending travellers aborted transactions for a lack of information.
* Online chat is helping visitors to the site to complete their bookings without logging off.
* The airline has recovered the cost of the system within just a few months.