Airport Experience® News - Customer Service Issue 2023

Left, Below: PHL airport staff and tenant partner employees a upping their guest service game ahead of two major events coming to Philadelphia in 2026.

Honing The Experience At PHL Leah Douglas knows the importance of working together toward a common goal. Douglas, director of guest experience at Philadelphia International Airport , and the PHL team decided in fall of 2019 to create the Guest Experience Stakeholder Council, a coordinated effort among PHL staff and multiple stakeholders at the airport to deliver an extraordinary customer experience. During the pandemic, the group met virtually and conversation focused on how to manage the upheaval. The Council’s first in-person meeting in January 2023 marked a new focus for the group. “It really enabled us to start where we should have been at least two years ago, devising collectively a mission statement, a vision statement, and our standards,” says Douglas. This year’s meetings – the group meets quarterly – focused on honing the vision for the Council. “There was recognition that we all need to work together, collectively, and come up with standards and expectations,” she adds. “If you don’t have any expectations, if you don’t express those expectations and communicate those expectations, then everyone is just doing their own thing. It’s like an orchestra never practicing together. Now we’re practicing, we’re trying to be the best that we can be.” The Guest Experience Stakeholder Council is currently co-chaired by PHL CEO Atif Saaed and American Airlines hub vice president Lakshman

Amaranayaka. Other airlines involved include Frontier, JetBlue, Southwest, Spirit and United Airlines . MarketPlace PHL, American Express The Centurion Lounge , several government agencies and a few others round out the roster. Douglas says organizations often have more than one representative attend the meetings, which in total attract about 60 people. With such a diverse representation, Douglas says the group underscores that all are working toward the same goal. The meetings serve to build trust, she says, “to make everyone understand [they need to take off their] individual business hats. We all represent the airport. If we are wearing a badge, all of our guests come up to us for directions or assistance all the time.” The Council is finalizing its vision and standards and, with a vendor partner, will roll out airport-wide customer service training soon. It’s also beginning to launch sub-committees, such as the employee engagement committee. “We’re talking

about different airport-wide events we can have to make sure our employees not only know that they’re important to us and that they’re key to a wonderful guest experience, but it’s also to make them feel valued and appreciated and seen,” Douglas says. That approach is new for PHL. “When we’re working on it together as an airport team, you just feel the energy,” she adds. “It’s not what we typically have done in the past by any means, and you get so much more buy-in, so much more energy. PHL is gearing up for two major events in 2026 – the 250 th anniversary of the founding of the country, in which the city played a pivotal role, and the FIFA World Cup. Honing the guest experience is a key focus ahead of those events. “Everything that we’re doing right now is under that umbrella, but we’re not stopping at 2026,” Douglas says. “We’re going to keep moving it forward, but we’re taking [the events] as an opportunity to get everybody excited.”

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AX NEWS CUSTOMER SERVICE ISSUE 2023