As one of the world’s busiest international airport hubs, Dubai Airports faced a challenge: how could they welcome even more passengers without compromising the customer experience?
With growing pressure on their teams and facilities and no scope for infrastructure expansion, they needed a compelling, multi-year vision for the customer experience that would help them maintain quality whilst numbers rose. One that could enhance passenger satisfaction, ease the strain on operations, and unlock commercial value across millions of journeys.
Working together with Dubai Airport’s strategy, development, commercial and operational teams, Engine developed an ambitious customer experience. It defined the target experience and created a roadmap for transformation, designed to evolve alongside rising passenger volumes.
As change couldn’t wait, we prioritised where we could make an immediate difference: improving the service delivery by front-line teams and the quality of information available to passengers.
The vision described how the front-line teams needed to shift from a purely operational role to one more focused on delivering higher levels of service and hospitality that would give guests a real flavour of Dubai.
In collaboration with these teams, we defined a service standard built on the idea of ‘Arabian Hospitality’ that we translated into service roles, actions and behaviours that was trained into the 100’s strong front-line teams. This also required us to reimagine the learning journey for the front-line staff to ensure they felt supported, empowered and part of the delivering the vision every day.
Working together with training partners, we designed and delivered a programme of training and on-the-job coaching, giving teams the tools and confidence to put the new service behaviours into practice.
“The difference in this programme compared to others is that before I only learned things in the classroom, but[this time] I got to practice what I learned so it has stuck”
- Shift C, Terminal Duty Officer
To support the front-line teams further, we also needed to improve how passengers could navigate themselves around the airport and reduce reliance on the front-line teams for basic queries allowing the front-line teams to focus on higher-value service.
To do this, we introduced targeted enhancements which included architectural signage, improved landmarks, simplified maps that all help guests better orientate themselves and find their way. As well as physical information, we piloted how dynamic operational data could be used by staff to keep them informed and make recommendations to passengers.
[The Airport Guide] supports staff to be able to serve the
customers better by putting the right information in their hands.
- Frank McCrorie (SVP of Customer Service Delivery)
After a successful six-month pilot, the programme was rolled out across the entire airport and extended to key stakeholders.
“Through taking a design-led approach to our service improvement, we were able to demonstrate that being vision-led and focusing on the customer could have a demonstrable impact on the customer experience, operations and commercial performance”.
“Engine has had more impact in three months than we have had in five years.
- Head of Customer Experience, Dubai Airports