We conducted fly-on-the-wall observations to see how customers used OAK.

We engaged with a broad range of stakeholders, from executives to custodians, to learn where customer service happens at OAK.

We examined the full range of customer touchpoints, identifying friction points and opportunities to improve service.

Following our discovery process, the team worked to make sense of the data, uncover insights and generate the design principals to guide our service design efforts moving forward.

We distilled our findings into a set of guiding principal for customer service at OAK.

We also began prototyping customer facing service tools inspired by our research findings.

OAK Customer Service Research

Oakland International Airport has long positioned itself as a service focused organization. Tasked with developing a new customer service program, we needed to understand the existing service experiemce. Distill employed a variety of research methods to understand the OAK service experience and uncover opportunities for innovation. We spent a day at OAK conducting "fly on the wall" observations of passengers and employees. We shadowed custodians for a day, talked with some folks on the tarmac and conducted interviews with managerial and executive staff. This research continues to serve as a key foundation for our thinking on OAK. We got a behind the scenes look at what employees really do, and felt out the constraints of the organization. The research informed our earliest advertising campaign and served as the basis for the development of OAK's new customer service program.