The MAG-O blog

Over the past six months a small but resilient team of Sales Executives, led by Leanne Kerry, have valiantly sat by the phones, taking on a barrage of customer service queries – from snowstorms, to booking engine changes, to bus fires, the team have bravely dealt with it all. Winter certainly came this year. Our first major challenge as a customer support service was snow…and lots of it! For MAG the snow meant a short closure at Stansted between Christmas and New Year. With the new interactive voice recognition (IVR) system armed with the phrases we would say most during the adverse weather, we took a whopping 1,200 calls over just three days! Suffice to say that after our baptism of fire it was a relief to make it into 2018, but the weather wasn’t done with us yet… January brought two more airport closures due to snow; East Midlands and Stansted again, but by this point we were almost professional. IVR updated, stock phrases on repeat, and with empathy, reassurance and a...

Last month several MAG-O colleagues attended the 2018 Passenger Terminal Conference in sunny Stockholm in order to learn more about the latest innovations in Airport Retail, Digital Tech and Product Development. Chris Stone and Dan Glenn shared their conference takeaways. Chris Stone, Trading and Merchandise manager, Product Development team I went to the conference in order to find out about new trends in airport retail and how other airports have adapted their products and customer experiences appropriately. Many of the issues discussed were those that MAG-O has been set up to address for MAG, such as the decline in airport retail penetration. This is a result of more low-cost flights, that have changed the purpose of airport visits exclusively to travel (purely getting from A to B), rather than as leisure and shopping destinations. It was extremely interesting to see how other businesses are addressing the same challenges we are facing, such as the increasing u...