Everybody has a tale of how they, as a customer, experienced some misadventure with a product or service that is both strange and unfortunate enough to forever taint his or her impression of that brand, and also bear repeated telling to friends and family, effectively sharing the taint. What tales are customers telling about your products and services?
My most recent tale of woe is as follows. A little over a week ago I was travelling home from an engagement at a client’s facility. I had only one carry-on bag for luggage, but because I had not paid for the wealthy traveler’s privilege of priority boarding, there was no room for my bag when my turn came around. I was forced to gate-check my only bag.
My process-improvement-cursed mind sent a sickening message to my guts when I saw the flight attendant scribble something that was supposed to be code for my final destination on the paper tag for my bag. I had the foresight to remove my notebook computer and my e-reader before handing over my bag, but as soon as I found my seat and strapped in I realized the real risk. My car key was in my luggage.
Need I provide any more foreshadowing or explanation? Two flights and one connection later, I arrived at my final airport, but my bag did not.
Because my bag was gate-checked and not associated to any passenger name or ticket number there was no way for the airline to identify my bag in its tracking system. Therefore, there was no guarantee, at 10:00 p.m. that my bag would be on the next morning flight from my place of connection. And I had no way to retrieve my car. My home is between one-and-a-half and two hours from the airport.
To make things more interesting, there were a series of cancelled flights due to weather that afternoon, so the shuttle that the airline offered to charter to take me at least to my home town had no seats left and most of the rental car agencies were stripped clean of everything but the $400/day specialty vehicles.
The airline tried to help me locate a rental car, but failed to close any reservations. In the end, I managed, after several phone calls to get through to an agency that could outfit me with a ride for about $100. I left the airport in the rental car at three minutes past midnight and got home just before 2:00 a.m.
I could have stayed the night in the airport and waited for my bag, but I had another engagement to attend the following day and no guarantee if or when my bag would arrive. I made my engagement after a half-night’s sleep, and later that afternoon drove back to the airport with my spare car key to retrieve my own vehicle and return the rental. I also picked up my bag, which had arrived that same afternoon.
What’s the point of this particular tale of woe? Well, first, we can all learn to remove our car keys from our bag before we gate-check it. Second, I want to point out what should be obvious, but is easily overlooked or dismissed. To the airline, my misadventure is simply a data point on their tally of correctly routed vs. lost bags. To me it was a total of 8 hours of my time (including some potentially productive, billable hours) and more than $150 out of my pocket for the rental car, fuel, and extra parking, some irritation, and some lost quality sleep.
To be fair, I will add that the airline gave me a travel voucher good for the next year, which I may or may not find an opportunity to use. While that travel voucher’s cash value is slightly higher than my out-of-pocket expenses for the misadventure, it doesn’t put that money back on my credit card this month.
To me, it is not a data point. To me it was a great deal of time, money, and inconvenience that resulted from the airline’s mistake or broken process. It is a fear. It is a risk. I would have been crippled if the problem had occurred on my trip out to do business instead of my trip home.
It is a black mark for an airline that I had hoped was one of the last holdouts for prioritizing customer service. Now that I have experienced its process, I know how easily the same thing could happen to me, or anyone, another time. Thus, I must now carefully consider if I will use that airline again, and if I do, I must know that the additional cost for upgraded boarding priority or for checking my bag at the ticket desk is necessary insurance to improve my chances of my belongings and I both at the same place at the same time. That means less profit for me.
It’s a lesson for all of us. Those data points we see in our quality charts or returned product tally are not just data points. Each and every one of those is business damage. Each one of those is business that may never be available again. It’s possible that each one of those customer complaints is not just one opportunity lost, but it is several because of the other people who hear the customer’s tale.
Consider also not just the business perspective of what those data points really mean, but also the ethical perspective. Could your mistake cost your customer business, or additional money out-of-pocket, or could a defect increase the risk of injury for a customer?
It’s easy to rationalize the “cost of quality” that our data points apparently present. How many travel vouchers and man-hours must an airline count before it can justify fixing a broken process? How many products out of every 100,000,000 must be returned before it makes sense to adjust the design or improve a process? Those business questions are easy to answer when that is all that the data means to us.
But to our customers, it’s not just a data point and a few dollars out of millions. To our customers it could be that tale of woe. We should not accept the apparent business trade-off at the value presented by our metrics. We should also ask ourselves if the problems we produce are the experiences we want our customers to have. We should strive to provide the best experience possible, because he or she who does will win business away from everyone who sees only data.
Stay wise, friends.
If you like what you just read, find more of Alan’s thoughts at www.bizwizwithin.com.