Immigration opens common inspection counter at KLIA

PUTRAJAYA: The Malaysian Immigration Department (JIM) will open up a common counter for passenger inspection whenever there is a congestion of passengers at the KL International Airport (KLIA) in an effort to ease the congestion.
Director-General of Immigration Datuk Seri Mustafar Ali said in a statement today that the department, with assistance from the airport operator, Malaysia Airports Holdings Bhd (MAHB), had set up a Customer Experience Management (CEM) team to cooperate in helping to disperse the passengers to the respective counters.
"JIM is also taking measures by deploying officers who will act as ushers to ease passenger congestion at the KLIA.
"In order to ensure a smooth flow of passengers and avoid congestion during inspection, the inspection counter will be divided into two categories, namely the permanent counter and the support counter. This proposal is to ensure that the immigration inspection counter can be opened 100% without fail," he said.
Yesterday, Mustafar jointly chaired a tripartite meeting with MAHB managing director Datuk Badlisham Ghazali involving JIM, MAHB and Airlines Operators Committee (AOC) at the KLIA, Sepang. AOC chairman Mokhtar Othman represented AOC at the meeting.
Among other things, the meeting highlighted the improvement of services at the KLIA and klia2 for a joint discussion.
Badlisham in a separate statement said the new common counter system would work well following the previously implemented counter guiding light system which had been installed in September last year.
"The counter guiding light system serves as a method to quickly usher passengers to the next counter as soon as it becomes available. This had proven to reduce passenger queueing time significantly," he said.
Badlisham also said that the airport operator is piloting a digital initiative with Immigration as part of a bigger digitalisation initiative at the airport to improve total airport experience for all our airport users.
"We need to properly understand and analyse our data so that we can all work together with one common objective to serve our passengers better. Thus, we will be working closely with all parties to attain the necessary data to facilitate the automation of passenger queue management," he said.
He said the Immigration Department had also committed that 30 counters would be opened and manned around the clock at the arrival level, and 10 counters at the departure level of KLIA main terminal. — Bernama