What is the point?

By | Category: Travel rumblings
Customer satisfaction machine

How-was-it-for-you machine. The version at London City has only three buttons.

London City Airport has installed Feedback Now consoles throughout the airport which, it says, enables passengers “to provide real-time passenger satisfaction ratings for different aspects of their journey.”

They have located sixty of the stand-alone machines at 16 different locations, including check-in, information desks, security, toilets, passport control and baggage reclaim.

This system, according to the airport,  “requires passengers to choose from three ‘emoji’ buttons denoting differing degrees of satisfaction. The responses are captured in real time and will help airport staff to allocate resources effectively. For example, if a ‘dissatisfied’ button is pressed in the toilet three times in the space of 15 minutes, cleaning staff will receive an alert via text message and be able to respond immediately.”

As I pointed out many months ago this is a plaything and is just a sop to passengers to make them believe that the provider is really interested in what people think. If this is linked to further customer satisfaction studies and not an end in itself I could be persuaded there might be some benefit.

Yes, I agree that the location of the equipment will tell them something about the location. That will be that more people are in that area and it might suggest that something is wrong but it won’t tell them what it is. Locating and solving the problem will require staff to check everything and using the example of  toilets could mean a single soap dispenser is empty, a hand-dryer is  not working, a cubicle is dirty, the floor is wet or that somebody decided to press the button for fun!

When I watched a similar machine at both Singapore Airport and Heathrow T5, I saw kids running up and down pressing whichever button they chose. Adults rarely used it.

This is, at worst, a toy and at best an insult to passengers. Over a decade ago, this idea was tried on buses since surveying passengers on frequently stopping services is disruptive and inconvenient. The machines were dropped after a short space of time as being a waste of money and unhelpful in assessing customer satisfaction.

How long will it take London City Airport to realise the same?

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