Below is an Autogenerated Transcript

Service benchmarking does not mean that you look at your competition. That’s competitive intelligence. Service benchmarking means that you look at other organizations to see what are they doing in other parts of the world or in other industries that we could learn from. So, for example, if you’re doing things online, you might want to learn from Amazon. If you’re doing things face to face over the counter, you might want to learn from hotel check-in. If you’re doing things where there’s transaction and then you’re following up to make sure that something was complete, you might want to do bank mortgage application study. Something that’s not your direct industry, but it’s still service you could learn from.

So where do Changi Airport get this idea? Well, where else, aside from airports, do families gather in groups, you always have to wait, there’s always some stress because you’ve got your passport and your money, and there’s frequent arrivals and departures? Where else, not an airport, do families and other groups come together, you always have to wait, there’s a certain amount of stress and there’s frequent arrival and departure and arrival and departure. Talk at your whole table. Where did Changi International Airport get this idea? It wasn’t from another airport, but it was somewhere else. Another different service environment. Where was it?

Hospitals. So what do hospitals do to give guests, families, patients a place to relax and sit and be quiet and de-stress? They create gardens. Talking about the nice hospitals, and the really nice hospitals have really nice gardens, and in the garden they have flowers. And if you have enough flowers, what do you get? Butterflies. Changi Airport went straight for the butterflies.

You ever been to an airport and seen people sleeping on the floor? When you see that, how do you feel? You don’t feel good to see it, right? You’re not even the one sleeping on the floor and you don’t like it. So at Changi Airport, they created all of these resting areas, not only for the people who needed to rest, but so that everybody else doesn’t have the perception point of, “Oh, my gosh.”, and the koi fish ponds, because it’s an Asian environment and the fish represent prosperity and long life. And the art forms so that people are going, “Am I in a museum or am I in an airport?” And this is what drives them 100% of the time. Of course, they’re running an airport, but it’s your experience as a passenger going in and through the airport. That’s what turns them on. And they realize that that experience has to be by design. You can’t just let the check-in people do the check-in job, and then the security people do the security job and then the immigration people do the immigration job and then the lounge people do the lounge job and think that you’re going to end up with a good experience.

You leaders have to take this higher level perspective of “From the very first moment somebody thinks about or hears about AL-ANSARI, where did that happen? Did it happen online? Did it happen in an advertisement that it happened in a shopping mall? Did it happen over the phone? And then what was that first point of contact that they experienced? And they haven’t even told you they haven’t started to fill out an application yet. They haven’t told you how much money is involved yet, but the experience is already happening. So this is not just about your process. This is about the perception.