Experience Fails

Experience matters, it has always mattered. However, now more than ever, customer or user experience is driving brand loyalty, particularly in the travel industry and, to a marginally lesser extent, the transport industry. Yet so many are still getting it wrong – or getting it right in theory but wrong in practice. Let me share a few recent personal examples.

Customer service fail

I must admit that I have, on occasion, failed to check, in detail, my travel bookings, which comes with the territory when you are a frequent traveler (or maybe it’s just me). On one such occasion I had planned a weekend meet-up with my daughter, in Bangkok, I traveling from Singapore, she from Chiang Mai. We met at the airport, late on a Friday evening and proceeded to our hotel in the city. When we tried to check-in I discovered that my reservation was only effective from the Saturday night – my bad. I inquired if they had any rooms available and was politely told that they were fully booked. No problem, only a minor inconvenience, there are loads of hotels in Bangkok – we repaired to the lounge to get on-line and do a search. Google’s first recommendation was they very hotel we were sitting in. A quick search through a well-known On-line Travel Agent offered us a room, at a very reasonable rate, at the very hotel that had just told us they were fully booked! Now, we all know hotels sell, or allocate, blocks of rooms to OTAs, hence the hotel themselves didn’t have a room to offer but, from a customer service point of view, advising me that I could try and make a reservation through the OTA would have been far more preferable and enhanced my customer experience.  

Airport experience fail

I was recently heading home from a trip to Korea with a flight late on a Friday night after a ten day trip away. Uncharacteristically, I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare, three hours before my departure, time to be exact. The check in process was relatively painless, despite long queues. Security – not so much. At one of the busiest times of the day, at one of the top three airports in the world, only one of two banks of security gates were open and not all available gates were in use. It was chaos. There was minimal and inadequate queue management and very little in the way of support or information. It took me the best part of and hour and a half to clear security. Consider the thousands of people in the queue that could have been on the air-side of the terminal, in the commercial dwell space, spending money on duty free, luxury purchases and gifts or at the many food and beverages outlets, increasing the vendors and airports revenues.

Airline experience fail

On-line check-in capabilities, provided by most airlines, do (or are supposed to), vastly improve the check-in experience, particularly if you have no checked baggage, as was the case with a two-day trip I had to the Philippines. Again uncharacteristically (seriously, I am only usually there minutes before check-in closes), I arrived at the departure terminal two and a half hours before departure. However, the queues for all check-in counters (all of which were not open) were mind boggling. There was barely room in the departure hall to move. Again, queue management was inadequate and information sparse. I spent one hour and forty-five minutes in the on-line check in queue for documentation checking. Thankfully immigration and security were smooth and efficient but still I arrived at my gate as the flight was boarding.  

VISA processing agency fail

“Making visa applications fast, simple and easy.” Well, that was what they said. Perhaps they failed to add “but only if you pay our hefty fees for additional services”. My fiancé recently applied for a visa through this particular visa processing agency – a process that took around four weeks…just to complete the application process, thanks to documentation upload fails, the system hanging, delayed, or no response, for their support team and generally an inconvenient hassle. We got there in the end, but are seriously considering excluding future destinations from our travel plans that use the same agency.

Hotel experience fail

“Check-in on line and simply collect your keys on arrival”. The, mostly, lengthy hotel check-in process has always baffled and frustrated me, so this was good news. Sign me up! I went through the simple process on-line and looked forward to my seamless experience. Alas, it was not to be. When I arrived at the hotel I had to go through the same process as always; passport, credit card, fill in forms, hang around, in this case for longer than normal because my room wasn’t ready, despite being after the official check-in time and the time I indicated I would be there when I checked-in on-line!

Technology has come a long way to improving our travel experience but there is much more that can be done.

·      Understanding the customers actual experience, taking feedback and taking the insights to take corrective actions

·      Cooperation across the eco-system with sharing of information to enable all parties to collaboratively improve the customer journey

·      Predictive and prescriptive analytics to determine passenger traffic volumes and flow patterns, enabling service providers such as security, immigration and ground handling to open and staff processing areas more efficiently and effectively

·      Self-service or full, on-line check-in capabilities, with mobile, or print-at-home, boarding passes, thus eliminating the need for documentation checks and removing one of the steps in the airport processing or, better still, proactive, automated check-in  

·      Embracing the full capability of technology for on-line processing to truly make the user experience better, easier and simpler rather than adopting technologies without the capability to support the process.  

Some of these are practiced at various locations around the world but there needs to be greater adoption.

Some customer experience fails are just down to training – or attitude – as was the case with my botched hotel booking.

Whatever the case may be, our buying patterns, behaviors and brand loyalty is being driven by user experience, and our last best experience determines the minimum expectation for our next experience.