Denver airport team walks up to 12 miles a day to enhance passenger experience
DENVER (KDVR) — As Denver International Airport grows in size and passenger volume, so does the potential for wear and tear inside the building. Now, a new team is focused on keeping track of it all to ensure a positive passenger experience.
Common problems include broken outlets, spills, trash left in seating areas and furniture that has been moved.
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“People really do think we should know about everything at all times. And this place is huge. You don’t always know about that,” DEN spokesperson Stacey Stegman said. “Or something may have just happened. Sometimes a moving walkway, we’ll have a child that pushes the red button and it stops. We don’t know that that has occurred.”
A little more than a year ago, the airport deployed a new team called ACES, short for Airport Customer Experience Specialists.
“It was really an effort to focus on what do you want to experience when you are here as a customer,” Stegman said. “Let’s put people out there to start looking at that journey through the eyes of our customers and have them address problems along the way.”
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“I just say I walk a lot,” Anthony Cowherd said. “I would say probably about 7 to 8 miles a day.”
Cowherd is one of four ACES in Denver. Each person can walk up to 25,000 steps per day, which is just under a half-marathon distance.
“We’re all over the place. You may see us crawling around on the floor. You may see us hanging out near a wet spill somewhere. We could be anywhere,” he said.
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Cowherd said he has lost more than 20 pounds since he started in the role more than a year ago. Depending on the day, he said he wears anything from tennis shoes to more professional footwear as he walks the concourses, sits in passenger seating areas and tries to find ways to improve the experience for passengers.
“We go through the gate areas every week. Every gate area. And we check the outlets, the condition of the furniture. We check the condition of the floors, lighting. We make sure everything is neat in the area so passengers don’t come in and go, ‘Ew,’” he said.
For larger messes and maintenance issues, he can call on other airport staff to take care of the issues more quickly than in the past.
“We know that there is an urgency when something goes wrong to fix it quickly, so by having people that are out there looking for those things, it just saves time in the end,” Stegman said.
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According to Stegman, passenger complaints have decreased in the time since the ACES team was implemented.
“They just had to drive down Peña Boulevard, walk through security, walk all the way to a gate. This is a time when they can just kind of kick back and relax, and we want that space to be nice,” Cowherd said.
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The ACES work on staggered schedules to try and cover as much of the week as possible. DEN hopes to expand the program in the future to include coverage 24 hours a day, 7 days per week.
In the future, the airport also plans to expand the team to include the main terminal area.
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