Design sprinting towards a great idea
At Schiphol we implemented design sprint in order to tackle bigger problems or ideas. We have done so increasingly with significant succes.
One of the first design sprints we did was trying to figure out how we can implement a CRM strategy for an airport in this modern age. Back in the day CRM meant trying to trick people into leaving their e-mail address in a form and tick a box that said you want spam in your inbox.
Schiphol, however, has a genuine need to communicate with their customers to improve its service. A lot of travellers pass through the airport every day, and they have a lot of questions. That got the team thinking, how could we make a meaningful impact?
The added value could be in a number of ways .We could help travellers with their bags, going through security, parking their car or catching their connecting flight. We chose to look at situations in which passengers actively seek for support, because if they need support, we can truly add value. We observed a lot of passengers at the airport and most of them are anxious about catching their flight. We wondered, what if these passengers encountered their worst nightmare?
The scenario we came up with was one that most of us probably have lost sleep over more then once: being stuck in traffic with the risk of missing your flight. If this happens, Schiphol could assist the passengers on the spot. We came up with different means of reaching customers and helping them in the best possible way.
In our prototype, passengers that booked a parking spot at Schiphol Airport and had an easy way to talk to us. So passengers that where running late could ask for instant support. By changing their ‘normal’ parking spot into a ‘Valet service’ and have someone ready at the departure hall to help them through security in lighting speed, we made sure they could still catch their flight.
We created a mockup in a chat environment, took it to the airport to show it to passengers at Schiphol and learned a lot about how this comes across. It felt really natural for passengers to chat with the Airport. It was quite surprising to see because all of our team had doubts about this format. But everybody went through it in a breeze, young and old passengers alike.
This success story evolved into a realtime pilot. For 4 weeks we had a great team camping out at the terminal and talking to travellers who needed support. It took a little time to get things rolling because nobody knew we were there. But once the social media manager from The Next Web asked the team for help things changed. He challenged our team to get him some Chocolate before he would board his plane. Once we got him his treat the Twitter sphere knew we where there. That got us going, thanks to a great team, we were able to help out a lot of passengers with loads of questions.
The following story really stood out for me. A disabled passenger encountered a problem. Usually she would contact her airline to arrange a wheelchair upon arriving. But she had forgotten to do so, and her airline couldn’t help her out, she was really in a pickle. She reached out to our team and asked if we could help her. Our team got busy and arranged a wheelchair just before touchdown, which was awesome. This was a moment when my heart as a designer really skips a beat, digital products touching users in a meaningful way.
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