Singapore Airlines fosters digital champions

Winning passengers is no longer a matter of updating product offerings at the region’s carriers. Innovation, driven by data analytics, is shaping an airline’s customer experience and also its operations. Chief correspondent, Tom Ballantyne, reports on Singapore Airlines’ plans to stay ahead of the game.

February 1st 2018

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Singapore Airlines (SIA) is very fortunate, said the carrier’s chief financial officer, Stephen Barnes, to have a CEO who understands the importance gets the importance of innovation. Read More » “You need leadership from the top. We are very blessed that our chief executive, Goh Choon Phong, has an IT background,” he said.

“He is enthusiastic about the opportunities it offers and is very much out in front trying to help us generate ideas,” he told the recent World Financial Symposium in Dublin.

Goh, who holds bachelor degrees in computer science and engineering, management science and cognitive science and a master of science in electrical engineering and computer science, all from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been driving innovation forward since he took charge at SIA on January 1, 2011.

In recognition of his efforts, Goh received the 2016 Dwight D. Eisenhower Global Innovation Award from the US-based Business Council for International Understanding (BCIU); the first recipient from Southeast Asia for the award.

Barnes said: “we are planning for fewer people to be involved in identifying and giving the green light to particular projects. SIA’s strategy is to create a “digital mindset” throughout the airline and central to this is a new staff training initiative, he said.

“We have made available a series of externally-provided innovation and digital-focused training courses. The idea to ensure that we not only have an occasional champion, but to have everybody using the tools and to feel free to come up with ideas,” Barnes said.

“We need to identify champions. We need to identify the successes. But we also recognize we need to celebrate failures - at least heroic failures. We need to learn when to kill those ideas quickly and what the lessons for the next idea are,” he said.

Last month, SIA announced a partnership with LASALLE College of the Arts, a Singapore-based tertiary education institution. Students enrolled in the programs at the college will conceptualize and design an Innovation Lab to be set up by the airline.

The Innovation Lab will serve as a collaborative workspace for SIA employees and external partners as well as being a test bed for technology-related projects, said SIA senior vice president Corporate Planning, Lee Wen Fen.

Last October, SIA introduced Android Pay and Apple Pay mobile payment services on its mobile app. Customers can pay for air tickets, redemption booking-related fees, preferred seat selection and travel insurance and other services at the time of booking.

These are all parts of a wide-ranging SIA transformation program, which follow some recent poor results at the carrier. However, the airline reported a second-quarter net profit in the current fiscal year on the back of stronger operating results and rebounding cargo business. Yield remained under pressure as competitors increased capacity. The carrier earned US$139 million in the three months to September 30, up from $47.5 million a year earlier.