Design of a seamless shower service experience for the new KLM Crown Lounge

Abstract

The showers are one of the facilities offered by KLM in their Crown Lounge at Schiphol Airport. This service is offered to KLM and its partners’ most loyal customers, passengers that departure from or transfer at Schiphol Airport and are a KLM or SkyTeam Business Class passenger, Flying Blue Platinum or Gold member or SkyTeam Elite Plus-member. The current shower service is a complex process, which involves different actors (i.e. Lounge visitors flying with KLM or one of the Skyteam members, KLM, KLM Lounge agents, cleaning staff, etc.) and interactions between them through many steps in the journey. The connections and procedures between these different components lack harmony and synchronization, which in turn adversely affects the performance of the service. In addition, shower service’s innovation needs have been overlooked as the service has not been included in KLM’s management priority until now. Due to the development of the new KLM Crown Lounge providing the opportunity to design a new shower service, KLM decided to bring the shower service up to priority focus. This graduation project from the master Strategic Product Design from the TU Delft complements KLM’s efforts to improve the Lounge service in general and the shower service experience specifically. It does so by analysing the current state of the service, by researching opportunities for improvement, and by proposing a design solution to be implemented by KLM within 2 years. This project is divided in four main phases; Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver, related to the Design Council’s double diamond model. In the Discover phase, insights were gathered by analysing the current shower service, the envisioned new KLM Crown Lounge concept and shower facility and by performing an external analysis and internal analysis. In this phase, most emphasis lied upon customer journey mapping of the current shower service and extracting the four areas of interest; external communication, scalability, shower logistics and process oriented, which represent the main weaknesses of the current shower service. In the Define phase, all findings of the Discover phase were clustered into building blocks for the new shower service vision. Based on these building blocks, the pillars seamless, personal and efficient were created. The different interwoven pillars formed the basis for the shower service vision of the new KLM Crown Lounge: ‘Making use of KLM’s Crown Lounge shower service should feel like a seamless, personal and efficient experience’ In this phase also the personas Lucien and Maria were defined, for which the new shower service was specifically designed for. In the next phase, Develop, ideation took place and out of the many created new shower customer journeys for the personas Lucien and Maria, a future shower service scenario for both Lucien and Maria were created. Together with KLM, it was discussed what shower service scenario would be feasible to deliver in the new KLM Crown Lounge that opens in 2018. In the deliver phase the final design was developed, focusing on the main problems clustered in the analysis of the current Shower Customer Journey, namely the AoI’s external communication, scalability, shower logistics and process oriented and the formed shower service vision. The proposition consists out of a three new product-service system to enable Lounge visitors to book a shower in the new KLM Crown Lounge in a seamless, personal and efficient way, namely via KLM’s mobile app, KLM’s self-service device in the Lounge or via the Lounge agent’s Appy2Help. The product-service systems were developed by means of user stories. From these user stories, the service blueprint was developed that describes the full sequence of interactions of the shower service process in the new KLM Crown Lounge in 2018. Next, the what if processes are described, which show how the system reacts when disruptions occur. This graduation report concludes with an implementation plan consisting of a two-year roadmap for the development of the proposed shower service system for the new KLM Crown Lounge and final recommendations.