Game of Phones: The Airport Advantage Teams

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 listening ear we battled on proudly through over 2,000 calls.

Soon after, word came of the impending Jet 2 terminal move. The check-in for four popular routes, travelling to Malaga, Lanzarote, Palma and Tenerife, all relocated 15 minutes down the sky bridge to Terminal 2 – you can imagine the chaos!

Again we were ready as the first line of defence, with the IVR and a dedicated Jet2 line for all customers wishing to transfer their car park, fast track and lounge bookings. 60,000 (yes that is 60,000!) emails and letters were sent out by Jet2 to all customers who might have been affected by the terminal change. On the first morning we took 1,200 calls in eight hours.

Wistfully, we dreamed of ‘business as usual’, but within a week the new MAG reservation system was launched at East Mids. Call volumes hit 1,000 a day on the week of the launch as we tumbled into February.

Then came the #BeastfromtheEast.

During this period, we fielded just under 11,000 calls, taking over 1,800 on our peak day and dealt with airport closures at East Mids and Stansted and the subsequent diverts to Manchester.

Two days later we had the Stansted reservation system launch, a little more challenging given the high volume of Ryanair flights from Stansted, but together with the MAG reservations team we overcame the technological challenges.

In March we had our first strike (how exciting!) in France. We knew the drill: more IVR updates, more stock phrases and much more empathy!

All these issues and changes stood us in good stead. The unfortunate bus fire at Stansted gave us an extra 600 calls over the weekend, requiring team coordination from my living room table, yet we proactively texted everyone one we could with the same old messages, status of airline, car park refunds, feedback form… we had this down now.

On top of all this madness we had been gearing up for the launch of our in-house Sales team in the 4M offices, a very proud moment for myself personally and all the project team who have helped realise this vision.

We smashed our first weekly target by 50% and we have consistently performed at this level since despite continuing bombardment. The hard work and effort put in by colleagues is truly fantastic to see.

It is clear that we genuinely care about our brand and customer loyalty, giving our time freely to call customers back and provide a reassuring ear. We keep our heads when everything around us is falling apart. Our resilience and ability to serve customers no matter what is thrown at us is something that makes me particularly proud to lead such a fantastic bunch of people.

Since I started at MAG in October 2017 we have taken over 130, 000 calls - here's to the next 130,000!

Leanne Kerry

Head of Customer Experience