“We also need to maintain an extremely responsive communications plan,” said Saurabh Sharma, Program Manager for the Business Innovation Group at MWAA, “so that we can address everything from the ordinary to the extraordinary.”

With respect to the ordinary side: MWAA serves as a lessor to the many shops and restaurants that populate its airports, meaning that retail tenants have just as big an impact on the customer experience. A study from McKinsey & Company, which looked at one airport in particular where executives asked travelers to identify factors with the biggest impact on their overall experience, found that retail cost and speed of food and beverage delivery (experiences that are controlled by the retail tenant), leave just as big an impression on travelers as do traffic flow, bag delivery, and more (experiences that are controlled by the airport lessor).* These complaints are a high priority, and teams at MWAA have a very short window in which they can recognize a concern, communicate with its merchant, address the issue, and resolve it with the traveler before he / she / they boards their flight. In ordinary situations, speed is critical.

With respect to the extraordinary side: “Safety is our number one priority. And if you look back at any sort of incident, there is usually some sort of indication on social media before it happens,” said Sharma, “which means we need to be active listeners. And if we hear something, we have to be able to move fast.” In extraordinary situations, speed is paramount.

Sharma and team deployed an outreach and engagement platform on Salesforce. It combines social media listening, customer service, and advanced analytics capabilities into one system, giving MWAA the tools it needs to track a question, concern, or incident from inception to closure.

• Social listening: Sharma and team deployed Marketing Cloud's Social Studio, which is used to identify conversations containing key words, hashtags, specific handles, a certain sentiment, and more (including but not limited to those managed by MWAA directly). “We use this as a way to bring situational awareness to our efforts. We receive tons of feedback across many  channels, and thus need to isolate the questions that are most urgent,” said Sharma.
• Advanced analytics: Tableau CRM was layered on to evaluate which category a given question or comment might fall into — lost and found, shopping, dining, or internet access, for example — and tag it accordingly, allowing the team to pull reports that reveal important metrics like how often a certain type of question is asked.
• Case management: Feedback from public-facing websites and surveys integrate with MWAA's Service Cloud instance, turning multi-channel customer feedback into cases within a single system. Service Cloud's profile-like setting creates a 360-degree view of the case, giving MWAA the visibility to case status at any point in the resolution process. “We also trigger email notifications to the customer so they know their comment didn't disappear into a black hole, and assign them a point person to be accountable for closing the feedback loop in a timely manner,” said Sharma.