Learnings from Terminal 5 – How to Avoid A Bad Experience

14.05 - Rick Harris, Director of Insight, CGA

Most companies think hard about the way they do things. It makes good business sense – firms are eager for their experience to be consistent, familiar and trusted, as this helps customers know what to expect from a brand. But this thinking also tempts firms to turn their experience design into an inward process, focusing on ‘how we deliver’, rather than ‘how our customers feel when we do it’. At CGA we believe this is a very important distinction.

Earlier this year, I was part of the general public that volunteered to help British Airways test out the Terminal 5 experience at Heathrow. Thousands of people were put through the system – checking in, going to the departure gate and so on.

The process was well meaning enough, but the whole exercise was done at walking pace. Every ‘passenger’ was polite, unstressed, unhurried. Nobody was allowed or encouraged to step out of line, because it was the functional process being tested that mattered.

My experience of real-life airports is very different – they are full of stressed people, both passengers and employees, and frustration is never far from the surface. These people and their emotions are part of the process of flying passengers from A to B (like it or not).

At CGA, we seek out the emotional elements of the experience that are just as everyday as the functional tasks of checking baggage. For example, if it had been us checking the BA Terminal 5 experience, we would have been interested to see what would happen when we:

1. Used an actor to push to front of the check-in queue in a hurry

• How do staff handle this situation? What do their actions say about the airline brand?


• What should queuing passengers take from watching and listening to how it was handled?

2. Loaded up an airside transit bus to maximum capacity – then closed the doors and waited.

• How do passengers’ emotions change as the delay lengthens, as the on-board bus temperature rises, when the engine is switched off suddenly and the driver gets out?


• What do people say? How do they interact?

By testing emotional situations like this, we can help drivers and airline staff manage these small, everyday episodes in a way that shows the airline cares and prevents an experience getting out of hand.

The chaos of passenger experience from the first week at Terminal 5 cost British Airways over £16m, and the carrier has since seen passenger numbers in April drop nearly 8%. These figures demonstrate a harsh financial lesson in what happens when management of the customer experience goes badly wrong.

Read more about CGA’s experience design tools...

To find out how CGA’s experience design tools could uncover the emotional pitfalls and opportunities of your customer journey, contact Rick Harris on +44 (0)1483 209 586 or rick@cgaexperience.com today.