Dépêches

New Varolii Flight Team Management Application Helps Avoid Flight Delays

Dépèche transmise le 24 juin 2009 par Business Wire

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--As the 2009 summer travel season heats up, Varolii Corporation, the market and technology leader in proactive outbound communications, is helping the nation’s top airlines eliminate a major source of flight delays and cancellations. Varolii Flight Team Management is a new automated communications application airlines can use to rapidly adjust flight and ground crew schedules when regularly scheduled crew members can’t work. Using proactive outbound two-way messages via voice calls, text messaging and email, airlines can find and reschedule far-flung employees in mere minutes. Most of large domestic airlines already use Varolii to send passenger notifications, and now with Flight Team Management, Varolii addresses two of the top drivers of airline passenger dissatisfaction – lack of communication when schedules change and widespread flight delays themselves.

More than Twenty Percent of All Flights Delayed – Varolii Helps Solve the Problem

According to the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, more than 20 percent of all flights are delayed or cancelled. One of the main causes is an inability or delay in finding available crew members when regularly scheduled crew members are unable to fly. As a result, customer satisfaction in the airline industry has dramatically declined in the last several years. Varolii Flight Team Management helps airlines address the problem head-on.

With Varolii Flight Team Management, airlines can:

• Improve flight team resource management. When a flight is delayed or cancelled, the flight crew is often too late or in the wrong city to continue their assigned flight schedule. Airlines must scramble to staff each follow-on flight with substitute crews who are in the correct city, available to fly and meet criteria set by unions and the FAA. Varolii Flight Team Management allows airlines to rapidly assess which crew members can fly, documents compliance with all regulations, and ensures new crews are aware and working to their revised schedule, thereby averting additional delays and cancellations.
• Rapidly and efficiently assess staff availability. Given the mobile nature of flight personnel, two-way multi-channel communication is critical to reaching employees and gauging whether they can fly, regardless of their current location. With Varolii Flight Team Management, airlines can reach employees via multiple devices including phone, email and text message, and even escalate from device to device if an employee doesn’t respond to the first message.
• Lower labor costs for schedulers and staff managers. Dealing with a widespread disruption (such as a major snowstorm) typically requires significant time and effort, and airlines often ramp up their operations centers to help handle the spike in rescheduling activities. As an automated communications service, Varolii Flight Team Management enables airlines to effectively manage large-scale schedule changes with minimal increases in operations staffing.
• Speed up and improve communication to inform, update and resolve emergency situations. Instead of relying on manual phone trees that may take hours to complete and still not reach everyone, airlines can now use Varolii Flight Team Management to send and receive information in a matter of seconds.
• Reach out to other parties including external stakeholders such as community officials and the media. In a crisis situation, airlines can be inundated with hundreds of requests for information that often changes on a minute-by-minute basis. With Varolii Flight Team Management, airlines can pre-empt most requests by proactively sending updated alerts, leaving spokespeople more time to triage complex requests and respond in an appropriate way.

Leveraging Varolii ID™, the company’s unique segmentation and analysis capability, Flight Team Management enables airlines to identify individual crew members in specific locations who are willing to fly, while adhering to union contracts and meeting the stringent dispatch criteria set by the FAA. These include minimum downtime since their last flight, type rating, training certifications and other requirements. Airlines have the choice of creating custom messages or using one of 10 pre-built notifications to reach flight operations employees—pilots, flight attendants, ground crews and gate agents—to gauge their availability, manage schedule changes and relay critical information in times of crisis.

“A single delayed flight can create a domino effect on the entire air traffic control system, affecting thousands of passengers and impacting airline profitability,” said Jeffrey Read, executive vice president at Varolii. “Varolii has always helped its airline customers provide convenient and timely schedule updates, but now with Flight Team Management, Varolii is the only outbound notifications provider that addresses both sides of the flight delay problem”.

Varolii Flight Team Management is now generally available. For more information, visit http://www.varolii.com/en/Products/Employee_Communications/Flight_Team.aspx.

About Varolii Corporation

Varolii is the market and technology leader in proactive outbound communications. Its on-demand communication software and services help organizations more effectively reach and interact with their customers and employees, getting the best result from every interaction. By automating the processes required for personalized communications such as flight cancellation notices, fraud detection alerts and prescription pick-up reminders, Varolii helps its clients reduce operational costs, increase contact center efficiency, and get more out of their existing IT investments. More than 380 companies, including many of the largest U.S. banks, airlines, wireless carriers, utilities, and healthcare organizations trust Varolii to send 4 million communications every business day. Varolii is headquartered in Seattle with offices in the Boston and Denver metropolitan areas. For more information, visit www.varolii.com.