ACI’s Airport Customer Experience Designation. An Aviation Industry Version of the UX Maturity Model?
Source: Photo by Nazrin Babashova on Unsplash
While searching for the perfect (does such a thing exist?)
passenger experience course I came across the Airports Council International Customer Experience Accreditation Programme, an award for airports who are working towards or have achieved a prescribed level of customer excellence.
On first sight, the concept strikes of Neilson Norman Group’s UX Maturity Model; a six stage journey towards a user-driven environment where the term UX isn’t even voiced; rather it is naturally part of product and service design from the outset. In the words of Neilson Norman, “In Stage 6, UX is the norm — habitual, reproducible, and beloved across the organization.”
ACI’s model is a well designed service concept deriving of eight key domains of equal importance that together positively impact airport customer experience. They are:
Customer Understanding
Strategy
Measurement
Operational Improvement
Governance
Airport Culture
Service Design Innovation
Airport Community Collaboration
ACI introduce each domain as being equal and co-dependant on the others to achieve a Level 5, the highest level of customer excellence, which states that ‘the airport corporate strategy is the customer experience strategy’ with further emphasis on the airport strategy being driven with one airport voice.
(Source: https://aci.aero/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Airport-Customer-Experience-Accreditation-Brochure.pdf)
In other words, to achieve airport customer experience excellence (or maturity) not only should airports be able to demonstrate an understanding of what drives an exceptional customer experience they should be actively promoting and measuring success operationally and strategically, horizontally and vertically.
Like many large, complex and highly regulated organisations, airports tend to work in silos and as a UX Strategist, differentiating organisational culture and experience design is nigh on impossible. The two are inextricably linked.
Therefore, the prerequisite of demonstrating a collaborative approach to customer experience excellence through defining service standards, improving processes and including stakeholders from across the airport community to achieve a Level 4 or 5 is good news and to be applauded.
Considering the end-to-end passenger experience
Of course, the end to end customer experience starts well before a passenger enters the airport terminal and finishes long after a journey ends. Therefore, stakeholders involved in any customer experience initiative ideally include airlines, OEMs and digital and technology partners.
This, of course, is where it gets complex. For example, airlines work to contrasting business models, KPIs and regulations (such as flight time limitations) that are often in conflict with those of airports wishing to maximise passenger dwell time in airside retail and eateries to encourage non-aeronautical spend.
So airports and airlines are in competition too, each striving to maximise revenue from every passenger while maximising efficiency, keeping costs down and delivering a positive, memorable experience for passengers.
Is ACI’s model similar enough to the Neilson Norman UX Maturity Model to ensure and encourage long term, consistent customer experience improvements?
Stepping up towards maturity is common to each concept. Five vs. six steps. However, the key difference is in the approach to maturity or excellence.
Source: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/ux-maturity-model/
Neilson Norman Group’s model is built on levels of knowledge, consistency, effectiveness and the ability to reproduce good user-driven practices at the highest level whereas the ACI model is driven by the inclusion of dimensions such as culture, operations and service design; essentially the ‘what’ not the ‘how’. For example, an airport can achieve Level 1 by demonstrating that “customer experience is an airport priority that is communicated both externally and internally” (https://aci.aero/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Airport-Customer-Experience-Accreditation-Brochure.pdf).
How they achieve that is a quite different challenge.
The fact is that UX mature organisations are few and far between. Even companies such as Apple can’t afford to sit on their laurels; achieving excellence and maintaining excellence are two different things.
It takes time, often a decade or more of consistently building and refining a collaborative approach to customer experience. Treading water won’t cut it. As will attempting to high jump to the highest level on either model.
Can airports get buy-in for longevity? Quick, impactful ROI from small projects helps. For example, reducing the time taken for a passenger to enter and exit security by X% or increasing the level of satisfaction at a retail outlet helps.
The key is, both models offer the opportunity for an airport to assess and understand where they currently stand in the journey towards customer excellence and, importantly, how they might combine knowledge, culture changes and service innovation to achieve that with one voice.
But, a customer experience specialist can’t do this on their own.
Too many have tried and failed across industry. It takes great leadership, an understanding of where you are headed and, importantly, why you’re headed there; in other words thinking strategically as well as operationally at every level and at every stage of the customer journey.