Southwest Airlines

To build upon their focus on the delivery of exemplary customer service, Southwest Airlines wanted to move to hospitality; a shift away from transactional customer service which is ‘done to’ customers, to a focus on how customers feel.

Objectives included raising the profile of hospitality and aiming to make it real in every single interaction; providing employees with personalised insight into the kind of hospitality you show and where their hospitality strengths lie; and assisting leaders in their hospitality conversations.

The Team spent three days at Southwest Airlines HQ and Dallas Love Field Airport.

The aim was to understand the organisation, culture and diverse working environments, how Southwest Airlines defines and talks about hospitality, and gain clarity around the communication and strategic landscape.

We spent time with senior leadership to understand how communication ‘gets done’ at Southwest Airlines.

We also interviewed 20 individuals from across the airline who had been identified by Southwest Airlines as being great at hospitality. The output from these sessions informed the development of a communication and culture programme.

With an audience of 57,000 people in 99 locations, we needed to find a simple human truth which would appeal to a hugely diverse audience.

So, “nothing is more fascinating than ourselves” sat at the heart of the programme.

This core insight drove the development of an online psychometric profiler which allowed individuals to identify their own kind of hospitality – how they like to show hospitality and how they like to receive it – and helped to shift the customer service conversation.

Developed with the University of Cambridge Psychometrics Centre in the UK and piloted with 500 employees; the 21 multiple-choice question profiler helped employees find out what kind of ‘Hospitality Hero’ they are.

A full suite of leader launch communications helped get the programme off to a flying start, while a selfie-functionality developed for launch boosted early participation and sharing, encouraging participation.

The development of an insight dashboard helped Southwest Airlines leadership to make the most of the data generated from the profiler, and to make insight-driven decisions about hospitality across the airline.