Long time without a post -- been a busy several months.
I'll start posting a few ideas I've had in the hopper. This one is a request from a friend who had a bad travel experience. It's a case study in problem solving skills, incentives, and thinking of people as human beings.
As a consumer of the airline industry's products, it certainly feels like their customer-facing employees rarely have any incentive or desire to be helpful, efficient, or even to solve a problem. Everyone is annoyed with the passengers when a flight is cancelled. How was that their fault? The annoyance is even worse if the first airline transfers you to another airline.
A woman stands in a long line, sobbing, because she won't make it to her daughter's wedding. She is mad at the person at the desk, who of course didn't make the decisions leading to the flight cancellation. Neither side shows empathy. Passengers who don't fly often are in a strange, emotionally charged world, and nobody seems to care. Each passenger takes at least a quarter of an hour to route to another flight, which is patently ridiculous -- any of a half dozen websites could find the available flights in less than a minute, and I could spend a month by myself and make a program that could guess at better flights, given access to their data, so that alternatives would be available before the flight was even cancelled.
Now, you finally get a new flight, but you have to go somewhere else. My friend and his wife were routed to a different terminal. They were told the wrong way to go, that they wouldn't have to go through security, and then they were given something that looked like a boarding pass, but was not. And they were not given their luggage slip, either. Of course, each of these items led to something nearly catastrophic, given the reaction of the airport employees.
They eventually do get a plane, but it will land 9 hours later than the original flight plan, meaning that the people watching their kids have to keep them overnight, destroying the sitters' plans to go out of town. The airline can't find their baggage, even before they leave the airport, and nobody wants to talk about it. They are annoyed at my friend and his wife, and tell them so in every implicit, and a few even in explicit, ways.
At their destination, the baggage isn't on the carousel, of course. They wait around, then they go the baggage claim personnel. Specialist: "Oh, I'm so glad you came! We had these bags and were about to send them back to Frontier!" On the bag was (a) a baggage claim with a barcode, which was how they knew how to send it back to Frontier, and (b) a huge item sewn into the bag with my friend's name, address, and telephone number. It came off a certain flight, and his name had to be on the manifest, yet nobody bothered to make any attempt to figure it out. (To be fair, at least these people were nice.)
It seems like this all boils down to incentives. Each person only had to care about a small, isolated job, and they obviously did not have to deal with the consequences of their actions, except in the remotest sense. It is understandable that people get annoyed when someone else doesn't understand a situation that you do, and their ignorance is making you do work, but ... that's part of the job at any public-facing company.
The bottom line is that airlines obviously do not have the proper incentives to make the process of flying better.
To show this, let's switch to another case study: Chick-Fil-A. No matter the problems you may or may not have with their public stances on moral issues, ... those people give good customer service. It's so good that they appear to have changed the industry, at least in the central Arkansas area. When you go into a Chick-Fil-A, each person is obviously incented to give you the best possible care, and to be so polite that it's joked about. "Thank you for that ketchup." "My pleasure!"
Obviously Chick-Fil-A employees do not have a more fulfilling job, or an easier one, and it would be surprising if they made more money (especially taking benefits into consideration). But the employer chose to make the customer service experience an integral part of the business model, and it shows.
Concepts missing from the airline experience:
1) Looking at other people as fellow humans to be respected instead of annoyances.
2) Understanding that ignorance is not stupidity, and people have different experiences than you do.
3) When problems exist, those are opportunities for better experiences, not for frustration and ridicule.
There are a lot more details to the airline experience that I omitted for space (employees rolling eyes, disappearing forever when they went to get help, responding sarcastically to legitimate questions, etc.). Part of my frustration with these events is that UPS can get baggage from my house to rural Spain tomorrow, yet airlines cannot take the bag that they tagged and get it to the same location where they are taking me, and they seem to not care to try.
A bigger part is that we seem okay with people acting rudely when they are frustrated, and using that as an excuse for either poor job performance or outlandish behavior.
That is all: two case studies in customer service. Thoughts?
I'll start posting a few ideas I've had in the hopper. This one is a request from a friend who had a bad travel experience. It's a case study in problem solving skills, incentives, and thinking of people as human beings.
As a consumer of the airline industry's products, it certainly feels like their customer-facing employees rarely have any incentive or desire to be helpful, efficient, or even to solve a problem. Everyone is annoyed with the passengers when a flight is cancelled. How was that their fault? The annoyance is even worse if the first airline transfers you to another airline.
A woman stands in a long line, sobbing, because she won't make it to her daughter's wedding. She is mad at the person at the desk, who of course didn't make the decisions leading to the flight cancellation. Neither side shows empathy. Passengers who don't fly often are in a strange, emotionally charged world, and nobody seems to care. Each passenger takes at least a quarter of an hour to route to another flight, which is patently ridiculous -- any of a half dozen websites could find the available flights in less than a minute, and I could spend a month by myself and make a program that could guess at better flights, given access to their data, so that alternatives would be available before the flight was even cancelled.
Now, you finally get a new flight, but you have to go somewhere else. My friend and his wife were routed to a different terminal. They were told the wrong way to go, that they wouldn't have to go through security, and then they were given something that looked like a boarding pass, but was not. And they were not given their luggage slip, either. Of course, each of these items led to something nearly catastrophic, given the reaction of the airport employees.
They eventually do get a plane, but it will land 9 hours later than the original flight plan, meaning that the people watching their kids have to keep them overnight, destroying the sitters' plans to go out of town. The airline can't find their baggage, even before they leave the airport, and nobody wants to talk about it. They are annoyed at my friend and his wife, and tell them so in every implicit, and a few even in explicit, ways.
At their destination, the baggage isn't on the carousel, of course. They wait around, then they go the baggage claim personnel. Specialist: "Oh, I'm so glad you came! We had these bags and were about to send them back to Frontier!" On the bag was (a) a baggage claim with a barcode, which was how they knew how to send it back to Frontier, and (b) a huge item sewn into the bag with my friend's name, address, and telephone number. It came off a certain flight, and his name had to be on the manifest, yet nobody bothered to make any attempt to figure it out. (To be fair, at least these people were nice.)
It seems like this all boils down to incentives. Each person only had to care about a small, isolated job, and they obviously did not have to deal with the consequences of their actions, except in the remotest sense. It is understandable that people get annoyed when someone else doesn't understand a situation that you do, and their ignorance is making you do work, but ... that's part of the job at any public-facing company.
The bottom line is that airlines obviously do not have the proper incentives to make the process of flying better.
To show this, let's switch to another case study: Chick-Fil-A. No matter the problems you may or may not have with their public stances on moral issues, ... those people give good customer service. It's so good that they appear to have changed the industry, at least in the central Arkansas area. When you go into a Chick-Fil-A, each person is obviously incented to give you the best possible care, and to be so polite that it's joked about. "Thank you for that ketchup." "My pleasure!"
Obviously Chick-Fil-A employees do not have a more fulfilling job, or an easier one, and it would be surprising if they made more money (especially taking benefits into consideration). But the employer chose to make the customer service experience an integral part of the business model, and it shows.
Concepts missing from the airline experience:
1) Looking at other people as fellow humans to be respected instead of annoyances.
2) Understanding that ignorance is not stupidity, and people have different experiences than you do.
3) When problems exist, those are opportunities for better experiences, not for frustration and ridicule.
There are a lot more details to the airline experience that I omitted for space (employees rolling eyes, disappearing forever when they went to get help, responding sarcastically to legitimate questions, etc.). Part of my frustration with these events is that UPS can get baggage from my house to rural Spain tomorrow, yet airlines cannot take the bag that they tagged and get it to the same location where they are taking me, and they seem to not care to try.
A bigger part is that we seem okay with people acting rudely when they are frustrated, and using that as an excuse for either poor job performance or outlandish behavior.
That is all: two case studies in customer service. Thoughts?
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