Video: Delta's Head of Customer Experience at Skift Aviation Forum

25.08.2023 - 14:31 / skift.com / Delta Air Lines / Allison Ausband / Sean Oneill / Brian Sumers

Delta Air Lines is striving to boost its customer satisfaction scores, and the effort is led by Allison Ausband, executive vice president and chief customer experience officer. Ausband oversees about 60,000 workers in Delta’s airport customer service, in-flight service, and reservations and customer care divisions.

Ausband addressed questions about how Delta has been fine-tuning of its passenger service when she spoke on-stage on September 16 at Skift Aviation Forum in Dallas-Fort Worth. How’s the carrier increasing its on-time performance? How are its trials of free Wi-Fi going? Why have the waittimes at its airport lounges soared and what is the solution? When will the carrier add air taxi service at selected airports?

Get the answers to these and other questions by watching Ausband’s full on-stage appearance with Skift’s editor-at-large Brian Sumers — or read a transcript of it — below.

Brian Sumers: Hi, Allison.

Allison Ausband: Good morning.

Sumers: I am known around here for asking the toughest questions, so let me ask you a tough one to start. What does the Chief Customer Experience Officer do? I feel like this is a new title in the airline world.

Ausband: First of all, congratulations to Skift. We are very thankful for in-person conferences, and thank you for those of you who flew in on the Delta side. But yes, and a little bit about my background because I do think it’s unique in how we have it set up at Delta.

I started out my career as a flight attendant at Delta. Very interesting, six months into being a flight attendant, learned really, really quickly what the airline business was much more than just taking customers from point A to point B. That we have a much higher calling, serving customers every day. It is about humanity.

I was serving our first class cabin, and one of the customers was the rudest customer I’ve ever had in six months. Went back to the galley and took a deep breath and said, “I got to go back out there and figure this out.”

It just so happened that this customer, we were carrying her son below on the airplane, and I knew right then that being a part of something like an airline, it is about humanity, and it’s about serving people every day. Every single person, you all know this, that comes on board has a journey, and we’re there to serve them.

I think that makes a little bit unique, with my current job as Chief Customer Officer, I have 60,000 of Delta’s 90,000 employees, really all of our customer-facing employees at Delta, along with our CX design. And so we’ve got the group that does the strategy along with the group that executes every single day.

We were just at an offsite last week looking at our customer journey map from the time they leave home to the time