We recently had the chance to interview Vivian Lo, GM Customer Experience & Design at Cathay Pacific Airways about the role of technology in the cabin and passenger expectations onboard.
Vivian Lo has a diverse aviation management background with key managerial positions in Cathay Pacific’s Head Quarters. Her experience spans Customer, Airports, Cargo, Revenue Management, Marketing, International Affairs, Airline Planning, and Regional/Country management roles in Taiwan, Korea, China Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.
Vivian is currently in charge of Customer Experience & Design, a department set up as part of the Cathay Pacific transformation programme. Vivian oversees the end-to-end customer journey on the ground, in the air, and through digital channels by leading an insights-driven and customer-centric design process to optimise the Cathay Pacific and Cathay Dragon travel experience.
Vivian is an avid advocator of Design Thinking and applying a human-centered approach to innovations in service and products, for which She dedicates her time to teaching and promoting this discipline.
Watch the full interview below:
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Key quotes:
- “We will be emerging from the crisis as a much stronger company and a much stronger team.”
- “What is most important, is that we’re empowering people with control and choice.”
- “Digital transformation is about giving a much more seamless, efficient and designed way of actually controlling their destiny and getting a better experience.”
- “It is not just about whether it is going to be touchless or pre-ordering, but It is really about genuinely understanding customer needs and thinking of the best way, a balanced way to meet that and give people control.”
- “Digital design is a very important and strategic design discipline “
- “Customers don’t just want touchless or digital just because they can but because it gives them a better experience.”
- “Our ambition and vision is for Cathay Pacific to be a much bigger part of our customer’s everyday life, covid or not.”
- “It is really about understanding the key customer problem here, about wanting to give a seamless and safe way for customers to be able to, first and foremost, be able to travel again and ultimately gain back their life.”
- “Our customers have told us very, very clearly that: we don’t want you to cut your proposition, we don’t want less food and we don’t want everything in a box.”
- “Going forward I actually think that customers are going to be even more discerning about which airlines truly understand their needs, so it’s really about balancing the risk.”
Talking about AIX:
- “First and foremost, the shows are about bringing together the whole ecosystem and allowing the valuable opportunity of seeing everything in a week.”
- “Being able to see how different suppliers actually see the future and present their future technologies – some of which are developed prototypes, some of which are game changing ideas – is extremely important for airlines like ourselves.”
- “A cabin product’s development cycle can typically be three to four years, so you really want to look at what are the most advanced technologies, what are the future trends and what are the capabilities of the future.”
- “The ability to see all the best and the most exciting aspects of the industry all in a week, is really difficult to beat.”