‘Pass the tea, smile and say thank you’

How Virgin Atlantic rewrote the flight attendants’ handbook, satisfied customers and, Michaela Bushell finds, started a long overdue revolution in service design

Step into 2,500 square metres of pure luxury. Order a Cosmopolitan from the Parisian-looking waiter at the cocktail bar and stretch out on an aubergine leather and velvet chaise-longue to watch the latest blockbuster movie.

Or, as you shoot some pool, look up through the glass and into the Sky Lounge, a hideaway mezzanine where daybeds stretch out beneath sloping windows and a dramatic skylight.

Welcome to Heathrow Airport – specifically, Virgin Atlantic’s Clubhouse, the company’s £11m flagship lounge. You’d be forgiven for thinking it was an exclusive private members’ club – but then Nick Jones, the founder of London’s Soho House members’ club, helped Virgin create it.

Virgin Atlantic’s service design team was launched as part of its marketing department over two years ago. The Heathrow Clubhouse was one of the first projects. Since then, the team has become part of the design department.

Subsequent projects included, notably, the ‘Brilliant Basics, Magic Touches’ programme, created to guarantee consistently high levels of customer service among the 4,500 cabin crew, rather than the usual ‘snacks and light refreshments’ service. The remarkable aspect of these projects is that Virgin is still the only airline seriously talking about service design.

In a country where the service sector makes up 72% of GDP, yet receives just 14% of R&D investment, and where 81% of Britons had a bad experience buying a service last year, the wonder is that it has taken UK plc so long to take service design seriously

“Service design is an emerging discipline,” says Joe Ferry, Virgin Atlantic’s head of design. “Other airlines talk about service delivery. Service design is a more innovative discipline. We’re trying to expand what a service can give to a company.”

Ferry is used to explaining what service design means. Yet, in a country where the service economy makes up 72% of GDP (yet receives just 14% of R&D investment) and where, according to research by the National Consumer Council, 81% of Britons had a bad experience purchasing services last year, perhaps the question shouldn’t be ‘why service design?’ but ‘why has it taken us so long?’

Joe Heapy, founder and chief executive of service design company Engine, has worked closely with Virgin. He says: “The commercialisation of services has bought with it the requirement to be more competitive, to innovate. We’re all much less interested in being one of many and being served by large, anonymous institutions. We want our individual needs served.

“This shift has created challenges for big services organisations. Some things that sound obvious to us as service designers are very hard for many organisations, such as genuinely seeing their services as users see them. To get out of the office and stand behind the customer and view their organisation from that perspective is a cultural challenge. Equally, where you have different departments doing slightly different things, it creates a very confused message for customers. This cross-departmental working is another real challenge.”

For Virgin’s design team, the difficulty came in communicating the service designers’ role to frontline staff. “It’s tricky because you’re explaining to people who have been in the hospitality industry – essentially delivering service design whether they know it or not – and you’re saying ‘Ok, we’re going to tell you how to do it’,” says Ferry.

As an intrinsically innovative company, Virgin had a headstart. For the first airline to introduce remote check-in, individual seat-back TVs and real cappuccinos onboard, designing service was a natural next step. “There’s an understanding that we’re constantly evolving to stay ahead of the competition,” says Ferry.

Service design results can be hard to measure, especially in the short term. But Virgin Atlantic – where customer satisfaction levels are currently running at 93% – is confident that it’s getting the right feedback.

“When we introduced our upper class suite seats, which flip over into a bed, the increase in morale for the cabin crew – derived from having the best product in flying – made them feel confident and proud of the environment they work in,” says Ferry. “ And then customer satisfaction goes through the roof.”

The cabin crew play an important part in developing service design. “Whenever we were developing designs – say for a new seating project or airport lounge – we would always get cabin crew or ground staff into the team so we were designing around the way they work,” says Ferry.

He now employs three service designers, with a mix of design, hospitality and cabin crew backgrounds. “We need the mix and the balance,” he says. “Raw creatives are comfortable exploring innovation, and the people who have a good grounding in hospitality or who are ex-cabin crew are open to new exploration while understanding the limitations in the air or on the ground.”

So will the rest of UK plc heed these lessons? At the moment, there are no academically trained service designers as there are no service design graduate courses in the UK, although this looks set to change, with plans for a new college to open in Northumbria. Meanwhile, companies like Engine are finding that designers are coming to them with an instinctive desire to design services.

“Designers today are more interested in how society works, and how it doesn’t work, and how they can contribute as creative problem solvers,” says Heapy.

“It’s no longer about designing the next coolest kettle or toaster. We talk about our experience in a restaurant or using Facebook or whatever it might be. Today’s design graduates are into that in the same way that, during the 1980s and 1990s, we were all interested in working for Philips.”

“Please remove my socks…”

And other passenger tales from the sky

“If I fall asleep, please could you remove my socks, as my wife does, to stop me snoring?” is just one of the more unusual requests passengers have made to Virgin Atlantic cabin crew.

In the competitive airline industry, Virgin has built its reputation on good customer service. Service design has played an important part in this, especially in the wake of increased security measures.

The same can’t be said for all airlines. A stewardess with budget airline Ryanair – which consistently tops rankings for flight and passenger numbers, but also gets the most complaints – was recorded on a documentary as saying, “If you pay 1p for your seat, don’t expect a lifejacket underneath it.”

Last year, 235 million people passed through the UK’s airports, and the aviation industry watchdog received more than 12,000 complaints. Most were about flight cancellations, delays and mishandled baggage. Many stemmed from Heathrow, which struggled to cope with 68 million passengers.

The customer isn’t always right, however. Particularly if, as also experienced by Virgin staff, they have a fear of the dark and request the lights be kept on during night-time landing and take-off. But perhaps one of the sweetest customer requests came from a mum who asked a male steward: “Please could you read my son a bedtime story? His dad’s not here and he’s used to a male voice.”

Article first published in Design Council Magazine, Issue 3, Winter 2007