Some advice: If you are booked on a flight with me, and the flight goes through Charlotte, change your flight.
But maybe two times, I have never flown through Charlotte in one day. My flight gets canceled, I miss the connection or–yesterday was a new one–I am taken off a plane about to depart because something is wrong and they “need to find a new plane.” (They didn’t.)
I don’t have the heart to blast the airline’s name here, because they sure took enough lumps last night: grown men cussing out ticket agents, immediate posting of long lines on social media and a bunch of people swearing they would never fly the airline again.
But the airline certainly gave us lots of reasons for getting lumps:
-After having us all deplane, they told us the good news was that there were lots of planes. It turns out there weren’t. Hopes dashed.
-There was only one line for rebooking, and it probably stretched 50 yards long.
-… But they also sent us emails to rebook online. Except there were no options, even when you clicked on “other flights.” As a result I’ll probably see my family awake TOMORROW, not later today.
-When you rebooked the flight, you had to pay for checked bags again. Why didn’t they just keep the bag?
-Turns out they did: When I went to claim my bag, it wasn’t there. They had kept it for the next day’s flight.
-And here’s where the final gut punch came: When I asked the folks in Lost Baggage about it, they said, “Next time, don’t ever pay for something you don’t have in hand.”
It was a heartless end to a night of frustration. This company clearly doesn’t care.
Each of the paragraphs above are separate touch points. At every step along the way, I was forming an opinion about the organization–what its brand represented.
The irony is that I was returning from training some technicians for a certain automotive brand on how to communicate with customers. We talked about how their ability to help customers understand repairs, or to better diagnose a problem, would be in many cases the key touch point in the customer’s evaluation of the brand.
In the past, technicians have been treated like the “trolls in the back,” or at best the idiot savants. Keep them out of sight of the customer.
But many are realizing that, as much as the website and the social media and the marketing play a role in forming a brand, the game changer will be interactions with human beings, however that happens.
If you want a deeper dive, here’s an excellent summary of how key it is to engineer experiences for customers and employees.
What process on your customer’s journey do you want to improve?
Whatever it is, don’t forget to invest in your people. You don’t want trolls in the back or the heartless in the front.