Collaboration via Customer Co-Creation Inspires Innovation at Delta Air Lines

The Challenge

Delta Air Lines was interested in updating certain functionality on delta.com, and wanted to ensure they best met their customers’ needs with any updates. In particular, the international airline juggernaut wanted to understand the needs and behaviors of their most frequent flyers– really see what they wanted and needed in order to have a great new digital experience. Additionally, Delta wanted to collaborate with customers in an iterative environment to create said digital experience.

Approach

Delta turned to its existing online insights community, administered by KLC, to conduct a Co-Creation initiative powered by CrowdWeavingⓇ.Community members were presented with a problem, or Challenge, and asked to generate ideas to resolve it. In this case the Challenge was to design their ideal logged in experience with regard to the functionality being examined. As the Challenge was presented as a contest, it created an atmosphere where they could compete against each other for the top solutions.

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Method

Community members submitted 50 ideas within a few days of starting the Challenge. And they really dove into the challenge – creating screenshots and mockups to illustrate their ideas, and posting robust, well-constructed explanations of their ideas.

One participant thought the iPhone homepage layout was a good model for presenting information and therefore used it as the inspiration for their idea.

Another included more granular details in their mockup and took the time to cut out paper and glued it back together in the manner they felt would be most useful then took a screenshot to help articulate what they were looking for.

Collaboration also gave members the chance to work together to make the ideas they suggested even better. Participants were encouraged to offer constructive feedback, offering suggestions to make the idea stronger and more robust to ensure they include features the collective would use.

In some instances, Delta even took the original idea – either written or drawn up – (in some cases literally!) by the member – and created a high fidelity mockup that was then sent to the author to make sure it represented what they were trying to say. This collaboration helped to build the ideas into more fleshed out concepts.

Concepts were put into a round of evaluation to make sure they represented customer pain points, needs and preferences.

Results

Through CrowdWeaving®, Delta obtained great ideas for innovating their digital experience, created by customers together with their team. Elements from these ideas were able to be built into their website update. Additionally, Delta was able to identify unmet needs that had previously not been considered by analyzing the ideas and the reasoning behind them. These themes were even more important than the final ideas themselves, as they continue to inform and inspire future website designs. The end result was a true collaboration between Delta and their customers.


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