Premium Plus helps Edinburgh Airport enhance passenger satisfaction

Edinburgh Airport is normally Scotland’s busiest airport and the 6th busiest airport in the UK – welcoming 14.7 million passengers in 2019. The airport flies to more destinations than any other in Scotland, working with a range of airlines including Qatar Airways, Turkish Airlines, Virgin Atlantic, Jet2, easyJet, United Airlines, Delta Airlines and British Airways. The airport is a major economic driver for Scotland and recently announced the construction of an eleven-acre solar farm on its airfield as part of its Greater Good sustainability strategy.

Challenge: integrate, homogenise and automate airport and parking customer support

With their tagline ‘Where Scotland meets the world’, they consider themselves as one of the first and main ambassadors for Scottish tourism. That is why the airport continually invests in their future and champions providing a great service to all customers – even the ones that don’t travel.

One area that can be most defining for customer satisfaction is within the customer support department. In the case of Edinburgh Airport, this was split up over two entities, one serving the actual airport and the other dedicated to airport parking. Before, these were two separately owned entities but recently, car parking was added to the airport portfolio. “Both entities were part of the same division, but they had entirely different working environments and processes. This not only made it difficult to report on data, it made it harder to follow up on customer queries or complaints in an efficient manner”, says Jade McAlpine, Customer Support Team Lead at Edinburgh Airport.

Moreover, the customer support processes were not intuitive or user friendly and contacting the airport was difficult for customers. Zendesk was already in use but sub-optimally set up, which resulted in the tool not being as valuable to them as they had expected.

“Premium Plus’ accommodating and pragmatic attitude helped us to rebuild the solution from the ground up, in order to fully benefit from the integrated solution.”

— Jade McAlpine, Customer Support Team Lead at Edinburgh Airport

The solution: Zendesk configured to fully meet the airport’s needs

Edinburgh Airport contacted Zendesk, convinced that they could benefit from the platform far more by integrating the customer systems for both the airport and the parking into one Zendesk environment, and by properly setting up this system to fit their specific needs.

When discussing the right implementation partner with Zendesk, the latter suggested getting in touch with Premium Plus, assuming this might be the ideal partner for the Zendesk implementation. Rightly so, reflects Jade McAlpine: “Premium Plus’ accommodating and pragmatic attitude helped us to rebuild the solution from the ground up, in order to fully benefit from the integrated solution.”

The implementation: carefully evaluating and optimizing each step

The implementation project started in May 2021, and the final delivery was reached in August. “This may not sound that fast,” comments Ashley Bardal, Head of Business Analytics at Edinburgh Airport, “but considering our careful, step-by-step approach with this project – we carefully evaluated each step in close collaboration with Premium Plus and applied the required changes before taking the next step – we can safely say the pace of the implementation was more than satisfactory.” The Premium Plus best practices were introduced and then tuned to the specific needs of the airport. These needs were elaborately examined and discussed prior to deploying changes to the Zendesk environment.

Number of tickets / month

Response time SLA reached

1 %

Ticket handling time reduced by

1 %

The result: one system, many insights, high passenger satisfaction

Both teams – airport and parking – can now work within the same environment. “This makes it easier to use and to support”, explains Jade McAlpine, “also, all data is centralised in one single place which is a good foundation for analytics and new insights. The teams feel more comfortable knowing that everybody can access the relevant information, day and night, or anytime during the weekend.”

The uniform approach makes it a lot easier to efficiently handle each customer request or query: “Before, customer tickets would get lost. Now, with Zendesk’s clear structure, it is much easier to follow up and is more efficient for our team”, says Jade McAlpine.

Customers now submit a query or request using unified forms. This provides the Customer Support Team with useful data that they would otherwise have to obtain later on in the process, comments Ashley Bardal: “Specific information such as the flight date, what area of the airport was concerned, the type of request or query… makes a huge difference in serving the customer quickly and efficiently, which in turn leads to less stress for the support team and ultimately higher customer satisfaction.”

The future: Premium Plus in the front row for future investments

The entire implementation was a great learning experience for all parties involved, Ashley Bardal concludes: “Even if we haven’t implemented everything we initially considered, we are pleased with both the collaboration and the result. Premium Plus took us on a learning journey with them which means we will be able to sustain the platform for many years to come.”