In summer 2018, KLM aims to open the world’s most attractive airport lounge. This graduation assignment worked towards a service strategy that lives up to KLM’s great ambitions. The service strategy should result in the ideal lounge experience, particularly for KLM’s most valued customer: the frequent flyer. KLM realizes the only way to meet today’s rising service expectations is by implementing a self-service solution. Eventually, this self-service solution will only play a small role in the overall service strategy.

In the first phase of this assignment, several Service Design methods are used to gain insights for the new service strategy. Service Design connects the desires of the client with the desires of an organisation within an overall context. Therefore, a context analysis, a company analysis and extensive user research are used to answer the initial research question:

“How can we provide service to all future ICA lounge visitors, in a way that fulfills the user needs and matches KLM’s ambition for the new lounge?”

Research in the context analysis showed that lounge guests differ in the way they deal with time and how they deal with control. These variables have to be taken into account in order to create a service strategy that covers the rich variety of lounge visitors. Extensive user research revealed the latent needs of the frequent flyer: a feeling of recognition and a sense of control. According to the company analysis, a customer-centric company as KLM should respond to these latent needs. Literature research showed that the ultimate customer-centric service lies in the combination between excellent digital operations and intimate frontline staff. Digital operations provide efficiency and the staff a human touch. The human touch injects emotion into the customer relationship by exploiting uniquely human qualities: creativity, passion and empathy.

After the research phase, two personas and a customer journey are used to structuralize all the data. The customer journey uncovered three problem areas. These problem areas are later converted into ideal service experiences using the service requirements. In the proposed service strategy, all the service channels work together to create this ideal service experience. This ensures a high valued end-to-end experience.

The customer journey also showed exactly where a self-service kiosk could respond to a certain need. These findings determined the final features of the proposed self-service kiosk. In the end, the new service strategy and the functionalities of the new self-service solution are explained using a scenario.