A Deep Learning Approach to Analyze Airline Customer Propensities: The Case of South Korea

Abstract

In the airline industry, customer satisfaction occurs when passengers’ expectations are met through the airline experience. Considering that airline service quality is the main factor in obtaining new and retaining existing customers, airline companies are applying various approaches to improve the quality of the physical and social servicescapes. It is common to use data analysis techniques for analyzing customer propensity in marketing. However, their application to the airline industry has traditionally focused solely on surveys; hence, there is a lack of attention paid to deep learning techniques based on survey results. This study has two purposes. The first purpose is to find the relationship between various factors influencing customer churn risk and satisfaction by analyzing the airline customer data. For this, we applied deep learning techniques to the survey data collected from the users who have used mostly Korean airplanes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the one of the few attempts at applying deep learning to analyze airline customer propensities. The second purpose is to analyze the influence of the social servicescape, including the viewpoints of the cabin crew and passengers using aircraft, on airline customer propensities. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method of considering human services increased the accuracy of predictive models by up to 10% and 9% in predicting customer churn risk and satisfaction, respectively.