An Airline Cut Messages From 10 a Week to a Few and Tripled Conversion, Consultant Says
AI sorted through offers from 50 business lines to pick the one message each customer was most likely to act on.
The Strategy Skills Podcast: Strategy | Leadership | Critical Thinking | Problem-Solving · 662: Customer Strategy in the Age of AI with Mark Abraham, BCG's Personalization Lead (Strategy Skills classics)For some of the airline's customers, the messages never stopped. They were getting up to 10 contacts a week, while millions of other customers got nothing at all.
The airline was selling far more than seats. It had about 50 different lines of business, including its loyalty program, travel insurance, and health insurance, each generating its own pitches for customers.
Mark Abraham, a consultant describing work by his own firm with the airline, said the team used AI to choose what he called the next best conversation to have with each customer. The system scored every customer every hour against thousands of pieces of content, and picked both the message and the channel, whether a targeted ad, an email, or the home page of the website.
For some customers who had been contacted as often as 10 times a week, Abraham said, frequency fell to only a few messages each week. At the same time, he said, the system reached millions of customers who had not been contacted at all because they had not ranked high in the old models used to predict who was likely to buy.
Abraham reported that customers felt better because they received fewer irrelevant communications, and that conversion rose threefold. He said the gains appeared in every product, not only in flights. No independent figures were provided to verify the results.
What changed, in his account, was selection across channels. Instead of separate campaigns for email, the web, and ads acting on their own, he said, one system compared the options and assigned each person the message and channel judged most likely to fit at that hour.
Questions people ask
What does a threefold rise in conversion mean?
It is the share of people who take the desired action after receiving a message, such as booking, buying insurance, or joining the loyalty program. A threefold rise means a much higher share acted, but Abraham did not say how large the audience was or how much total revenue changed.
Does personalization always mean sending less?
Not always. In this case fewer messages worked because many were irrelevant, and cutting them made the useful ones easier to notice. A company that already sends little mail might sell more by adding a timely reminder.
How does AI choose between email, ads, and the website?
Modern systems test past behavior, including purchases, clicks, and responses, to predict which channel a person actually uses. Email may work for one traveler, while another responds only to an ad or a website offer, so the choice itself becomes part of the personalization.