Midterm Reaction Paper on "Focus on Your Customer's Customer"

Focus on Your Customer's Customer

2:21 PM Tuesday April 26, 2011
by Kerry Bodine 

Much of the conversation about customer-centricity focuses on business-to-consumer (B2C) firms. And while these companies were the first to acknowledge the business benefits of delivering a great customer experience, business-to-business (B2B) organizations are increasingly getting in on the game. Companies like Salesforce.com, Philips, and Oracle have appointed chief customer officers, while many other B2B players have embarked on enterprise-wide efforts to improve their marketing, sales, and support interactions.

These customer experience management initiatives can be complex. B2B companies serve a more complicated set of customer roles — including influencers, purchasers, and implementers — whose needs vary significantly. Often, the best way for B2B companies to satisfy the multitude of business customers is to focus on the needs of their customers' customers.

That's exactly what Portuguese airport operator ANA Aeroportos de Portugal did in its quest to attract more major airlines and connecting routes. To understand the work, first you need to understand an airport's business model: its real customer isn't travelers, but the airlines that rent the gates and terminals, much like a mall owner leases space to retailers.

ANA was facing fierce competition in the European market, and its executives realized that they needed to complement their focus on airline relationships and infrastructure initiatives — think baggage transfers and runway maintenance, the kind of behind-the-scenes logistical details that appeal to airlines — with new initiatives focused on the roughly 24,000 airline passengers that pass through ANA's eight airports each day.

In 2008, ANA engaged Engine Service Design in a multiyear project to help the organization understand passengers' needs and expectations throughout the travel experience — and to translate those insights into a new vision for airport passenger services. The team kicked off by conducting in-airport interviews with travelers. Their findings quickly confirmed that ANA's focus on its customers' customers would benefit the airlines, as well. Why? Travelers saw the airport experience as a whole, and often they didn't know where the airport's services ended and the airlines' began.

The primary research also identified six underlying passenger needs and desires. These included wanting more control across the various stages of their journeys, and feeling an increased sense of Portuguese culture throughout the airport environment. From these needs, Engine and ANA identified three roles that defined how the airports should behave: the advisor, a knowledgeable resource that helps passengers arrive prepared; the companion, a helpful guide who knows what passengers like; and the hero, a friend who provides help when passengers need it the most.

After defining the passenger services strategy, Engine and ANA designed a set of service offerings that supported the three airport behavioral roles. These included:

• My Family: Services to help reduce stress for families traveling with small children, such as breastfeeding facilities, locker and stroller rental, and children's play areas.

• Travel Together: Customizable spaces and complete baggage management for passengers traveling in groups for events ranging from industry conferences to vacations.

• ANA PODs: Dedicated environments designed to meet passengers' various needs throughout their time at the airport. For example, the Escape POD provides for entertainment and relaxation during downtime, while the Connect POD provides onward travel information and destination support.

• Greenway Plus: A fast-track corridor for airport security targeted at business travelers, complemented by valet services, private lounge access, and baggage delivery.

• My Airport: A technology platform that makes airport information available through the Web and mobile devices and connects passengers with airport service providers.

Because the quality of service-based interactions is so dependent on both frontline and behind-the-scenes employees, new services almost always require significant changes within the organization. As Engine co-founder Oliver King has said, "A great service comes from a great organization." To this end, ANA will measure the initiative's success not only by hard metrics like increased revenue, but also by the organization's ability to sustain its fundamental shift in focus from airport operations to the delivery of passenger-centered services. Since the project's inception, several major workstreams have begun to reconfigure core functions at all levels of the organization, establish a services management team, and develop new internal practices and service standards. For example, ANA plans to train all its frontline staff on how to deliver passenger-centric service experiences — and hopes to extend this training to its partners' personnel, as well, in order to ensure a seamless passenger experience across the entire airport.

These programs, coupled with the project team's collaboration with personnel from each of ANA's eight locations, are reshaping the airport operator's corporate culture so that passenger service is embedded in every action and decision.

ANA is currently piloting the new family areas, ANA PODs, and security screening services across its airports and gathering passenger feedback. Project coordinator Francisco Pita says: "In the new age of airport business, 'owning the passenger' and providing excellent service quality are becoming critical to ensure profitable and sustainable growth. This project provided ANA with an extraordinary set of strategic and tactical tools to face these challenges."

Kerry Bodine is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research where she serves Customer Experience professionals.

Reaction:

This type of treatment towards clients, as acquired by the ANA Aeroportos de Portugal, is inherently a manifestation that business firms are growing wiser as time passes. They're concurrently coping up with the ever increasing standards of living of people and this stirs up a lot of assumptions in my mind. Apparently, they're providing for further convenience of the people. As the invisible hand commands, they're attempting to earn the most out of the people while they juice all potential prospects of production out of limited revenue.

From this article I have realized the importance of considering the side of businesses in discussing economy because almost always I encounter those that tackle how consumers behave. This is not only for prior notice of improvement or deterioration in service and what they're up to but also to update myself of what obstacles they face in their enterprise. Their side also has a lot of mysteries and ambiguities to unlock and to keep so as to avoid failures, basically. Thus, I've realized how comments/suggestions slots in consumer surveys and customer service centers in supermarkets help both sides of participants in the economic game. And, both sides are inevitably interrelated. While consumers are into "budgeting", firms are into "innovating". 

It impresses me how the firms, responsible for satisfying our superficial needs, are coming up with innovations that allows us to enjoy and to participate in the market. I am looking forward into witnessing more of this locally, though. This is so especially because businesses which "harbor" other subordinate businesses are common in the Philippines. Businesses should make it a point to extend their involvement from their direct clients up to the clients of those direct clients. Let's take for example fastfood franchises. Services could vary among franchises of the same fastfood chain just because they're managed by different people that is why, I believe, some system should be developed to maintain bureaucratic uniformity within. Just as how the ANA aspires to sustain whatever move they've done first over gaining an increase in profit, I'd like our economy to do the same. As the cliché holds: Great things come from small beginnings. I assume we lack initiative and we're fond of everything instant. I believe careful planning, even in fields out of economics, is really essential towards attaining growth.