Navigating the Skies of Customer Feedback: Lufthansa's Approach to Data-Driven Satisfaction.

Insights Across All Altitudes  

The Lufthansa Group is the leading European airline group and one of the largest worldwide, with Lufthansa itself serving as Germany’s flag carrier. As a founding member of Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance established in 1997, the Group combines global connectivity with a strong commitment to premium service and innovation.

Lufthansa Group views customer satisfaction as more than just reaching a destination: it's about enhancing the journey. Through Caplena’s advanced text analysis, the airline has refined its method of decoding open-ended feedback, enabling a deeper understanding of what passengers truly value. 

By analyzing large volumes of unstructured feedback, Lufthansa gains a clearer view of the key pain points and areas for improvement in their customer experience. This approach not only helps elevate service standards but also fosters a proactive, customer-centric culture. The insights generated flow into the Lufthansa Group’s Customer Insights Hub, a central platform used by over 1,000 employees daily to monitor satisfaction, identify issues, and drive continuous improvements. 

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We chose Caplena because they are the frontrunners when it comes to AI. The intuitiveness of the platform and its customization capabilities were key factors for us.

Niklas Melchior

Customer Insights Expert

From Booking to Baggage: Mapping the Customer Journey 

Lufthansa monitors the customer journey from booking to baggage collection, viewing each phase through the eyes of the passenger. The goal is to identify friction points early and keep the experience as smooth as possible. To support this 360° view, the airline collects feedback through several channels: 

• Email invitations after each flight 

• QR codes placed in lounges 

• SMS messages following contact with Customer Service 

This feedback is then combined with other sources in the Insights Hub, helping teams track sentiment in real time and respond more effectively to what customers need. 

The Analytical Journey

1. Feedback Collection & Categorization 

At the core of Lufthansa’s feedback analysis is the Net Promoter Score (NPS), paired with open-ended questions that allow customers to share their thoughts in their own words. This combination provides deep insights into the why behind customer sentiment. The feedback is then categorized into three main areas of the customer journey: 

• Ground Operations: Feedback on services before takeoff (check-in, lounges, etc.) 

• In-Flight Service: Passenger experience onboard, including food & beverages, Wi-Fi, and entertainment 

• Brand Perception: Insights on Lufthansa’s image, reliability, and safety 

Lufthansa uses AI-powered analysis to process and categorize over 600,000 pieces of feedback annually. This helps turn raw data into actionable insights.  

2. The Flow of Feedback

Analyzing the open-ended feedback is complex due to the hugely diverse responses. All diverse sources of feedback converge at Qualtrics and get channeled into Lufthansa’s self-crafted Insights Hub. The process is fully automated, from the data collection, analysis, and reporting to internal stakeholders. Let's break down the tech stack flow into the following stages:

1. Data Collection: Through Caplena’s direct integration with Qualtrics, feedback from multiple channels is collected, including open-ended responses to the main question that captures the breadth of the customer experience, as well as closed quantitative questions. Once Qualtrics receives a completed survey, it synchronizes the comments with Caplena, making the results instantly visible. 

2. Caplena’s Open-Ended Analysis: Caplena processes the open-ended responses, organizing the feedback into three main categories. This classification brings structure to the data, making it actionable. Within each category, feedback is further subdivided into numerous specific topics. This approach allows Caplena to categorize over 600K pieces of feedback annually into more than 600 detailed topics, which are visualized through Caplena’s built-in dashboards. 

3. Into the Insights Hub: The processed data is visualized on Caplena’s dashboards, which are embedded within Lufthansa’s Insights Hub via iframe. Here, it sits alongside data from other sources, creating a rich blend of both qualitative and quantitative insights. The Insights Hub is used by over 1,000 employees across Lufthansa Group, offering 20 pre-configured views and replacing more than 50 legacy reports. 

4. Insight Chat: In addition to reports, teams across the Lufthansa Group can use Caplena’s agent feature. Insight Chat acts as a central brain consolidating 3 million customer comments. They can ask any questions such as “what do business class passengers say about food and beverages on board?” and Insight Chat will return a detailed answer within seconds, including quantitative and qualitative analysis.   

5. Managerial Insights: Internal stakeholders can easily access this data and filter it based on their specific responsibilities. For example, lounge managers can focus on feedback related to lounge facilities and services within their specific regions to extract actionable insights for their lounges. 

With Caplena’s driver analysis, Lufthansa’s teams can quickly see which topics have the biggest impact on satisfaction: both positive and negative. This helps them focus on what matters most and understand the reasons behind NPS results in a more structured way. Each topic is quantified, making it easier to connect customer feedback to concrete decisions. 

3. The Outcome

Lufthansa’s strategic use of Caplena and its Insights Hub has transformed how the airline operates by providing real-time access to actionable customer feedback, placing insights at the fingertips of over 1,000 employees at every level. From ground operations to in-flight services and lounges, feedback is accessible across all touchpoints, ensuring no aspect of the customer experience is overlooked. 

This democratization of insights allows employees, such as lounge managers, to directly access customer sentiment relevant to their areas of responsibility. Real-time visibility of feedback ensures that every team member, from senior management to frontline staff, can make informed decisions that improve the customer journey at every altitude. 

Insight Chat, consolidates millions of customer comments and empowers teams to ask questions using natural language, and get quantitative and qualitative insights in seconds. With the ability to analyze diverse sources of feedback, from satisfaction surveys to social media, Lufthansa can respond rapidly to business questions, validate assumptions, discover hidden insights, ensuring that every touchpoint—from booking to baggage—is optimized. 

This ensures that Lufthansa is not just reacting to NPS scores but also proactively improving the travel experience based on the feedback that truly matters. 

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Insight Chat provides you with valid data to a depth people are surprised by – visuals in Insight Chat are a real game changer for us.” 

Niklas Melchior

Customer Insights Expert

Conclusion

Lufthansa’s collaboration with Caplena has revolutionized their approach to enhancing the passenger experience. Key takeaways include: 

• Customer-Centric Decision-Making: Lufthansa’s focus on making insights actionable at all levels, driving a customer-first approach. 

• Actionable Insights Across Touchpoints: Embedding insights (and joy) into every phase of the customer journey, from ground operations to lounges and in-flight services. 

• Empowered Teams at All Altitudes: With real-time access to customer feedback through Caplena's Insight Chat and their Customer Insights Hub, Lufthansa democratizes insights across the organization: enabling employees at all levels to make informed, data-driven decisions. 

• Continuous Improvement with NPS: Using NPS and open-ended feedback to understand the “why” behind satisfaction, leading to targeted improvements. 

• Proactive Experience Optimization: Not just reacting to feedback but using real-time data to proactively enhance the customer experience. 

Curious to know more? Check our mini-interview with Niklas Melchior, showcasing the benefits of AI-driven feedback analysis in improving customer experience.