Customer Service Strategy for Airports

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Hi, I’m John Tschohl.
I’d like to talk about how we can use what I call the customer service strategy for airports. I fly a lot. I’m in airports every week all over the world. In some, I have a very great customer experience. In some, I just want to get out of as fast as possible. Everybody needs to understand they’re in customer service. That starts with security to all of the food courts to every single person in an airport. We’ve got to understand that this is a customer, and they have choices as to what airport they go to. If the experience is negative in the airport, then it could also impact what happens on the plane. We need to make sure that every single person has several different things they do.

Number one, we’ve got to understand the customer experience. We’ve got to change some of the policies and rules and procedures that we have to make it easier for people to do business with us.Secondly, we have to teach all of our employees the skills in the art of customer service. It doesn’t matter what part of the airport you’re involved in. They understand how to take a customer. When you’re flying, some people are grumpy. They’re crabby. Bad things are happening. They’re missing their flights. You’ve got weather delays. Have your employees been trained on how to handle irate customers in difficult situations? What kind of money have you spent building and developing your people so that when the customer walks by, they experience heaven instead of hell.

Secondly, we have to teach all of our employees the skills in the art of customer service. It doesn’t matter what part of the airport you’re involved in. They understand how to take a customer. When you’re flying, some people are grumpy. They’re crabby. Bad things are happening. They’re missing their flights. You’ve got weather delays. Have your employees been trained on how to handle irate customers in difficult situations? What kind of money have you spent building and developing your people so that when the customer walks by, they experience heaven instead of hell.

The average employee tends to be young. You can go to any school for the rest of your life, anywhere in the world. Nobody’s going to teach them the skills in the art of customer service. It’s your responsibility. It’s your business. If you want high-performing, customer-driven employees, you have to spend the money to build and develop them, so that they got some of fundamentals down. There is no magic program that you could buy from service quality [inaudible 00:02:00] or any other company where you can dip your employee, put them in this magic little program, and Bingo! For the rest of their life, they’re going to be customer-driven. Well, then we’ve got to make sure that everybody’s empowered. That they can make fast decisions to bend the rules, to create a better customer experience.

See, I think the strategy is, there’s so much competition of where a customer can spend money in your airport. There’s so many negative things that can happen. There are so many opportunities for the customer to antagonize one of your employees. You want to teach people these skills, so that you have at your airport the best, most customer-driven employees in your entire city. Thank you.

Look at Leading Empowered Teams to see how I can help you improve the customer service strategy in your airport.