Take-off Tips

Background

In most departure lounges of most airports there are a lot of bored people waiting passively to board a flight.

KLM, an airline that has consistently positioned itself as being Number One for customer service, wondered if it could help its passengers use that time more productively.

Idea

What if travellers waiting to fly abroad could exchange tips face-to-face with others who were heading in the opposite direction? They could both give and receive the sort of advice that is never found in the guidebooks.

Installations were constructed at Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro and Oslo airports where, projected onto a transparent fabric, 3-D facial scanning and hologram technology enabled travellers to sit and talk face to face even though they were separated by thousands of miles.

The technology took three months to develop, test and perfect.

Once the hologram bars were built, real conversations of real travellers were filmed and a short film of the warmest moments shared on KLM’s social channels.

Results

Not yet available.

Our Thoughts

KLM’s understanding of social media has been impressive for many years. On the one hand they have been able to build personal relationships with their customers, on the other they have built a global brand around a core idea about exceptional customer service.

Today, KLM is said to have the largest social media support team in the world with 300 staff responding to over 180,000 messages a week.

They innovate constantly and every innovation is a story about improving the customer experience. Though they are one of the first brands to find a use for augmented reality, voice assistants and now holograms, they have always managed, brilliantly, to put a human face on technology.