Dude, where’s my positive experience?

Don’t let your customer’s journey end to a negative experience.

Customer journey consists of micro-moments and interactions the customer has with the company, which provide the customer positive or negative service experiences. Positive experiences add value to the customer. They are unique, surprisingly well designed solutions to customer problems. Negative service experiences are the opposite, caused by poor design, poor implementation or human factors.

Research shows that 89% of customers have switched brands because of negative customer experience. This means that each time a company provides their customer a negative service experience it either affects directly the bottom line, or harms the brand image which ultimately leads to the same outcome.

However, poor experiences are inevitable. It’s impossible to avoid them. What matters is how companies react to them and start to anticipate them. Poor experiences can be compensated and turned into strengths that prolong the customer relationship.

Let me give you an example of a customer journey which ended to a negative experience.

Case Lufthansa

The customer journey starts with a “customer need” to visit Barcelona. Me and my wife selected Lufthansa (LH) as our carrier because of the cheapest price and reasonable flight schedules. All the carrier brands were equal to us so they didn’t affect the decision. Everything went well during the booking and buying process, and the customer experience was okay until we arrived to our destination Barcelona (BCN).

We waited for our luggage by the belt at the airport and soon noticed that we were the only ones there. This was a shitty feeling. A long awaited holiday and suddenly something was about to ruin a part of it. We went to the service desk and after giving our luggage number to the service rep, she surprisingly eagerly said that “Your luggage is in Munich”.

At this point the customer experience LH provided us went crashing down. To empathize, consider that when you are traveling for a holiday your time at the destination is limited and you want to enjoy every second to the fullest. At that moment we understood that a few hours of our precious time would be lost because we needed to make sure we get our delayed luggage. In other words, if you think of holiday as a project, getting the luggage is on the critical path.

For a second the customer rep got our hopes up by saying that we would get our luggage already that night. Not bad. However, after giving a lot of information (that LH already should have!) we understood that we would get the luggage that night IF we picked it up from the airport ourselves. We didn’t even consider this option because she continued by saying that a driver could bring it to our place the next morning. She estimated that the luggage should arrive between 8 and 11 am.

What happened the next morning was that a guy called and woke us up at 7am just to tell us that the luggage would be delivered between 9 and 1 am. The call had absolutely no value to us. As the sun rose in beautiful Barcelona and the day passed on we called the customer service several times. At 1pm we heard that the estimated arrival time was between 9am and 2pm. We also learned that we should stay at our apartment because the delivery guy wouldn’t call us when he arrives. The reason was the he doesn’t speak English and thus avoids calling foreign numbers... When we called again after 2pm the estimation was “in the afternoon”, and so on.

All together 5 LH customer service reps gave us 5 different time frames. The last rep we talked to finally said the following: “It’s impossible to give a time frame. We never know when the luggage will arrive.”

Finally around 6.30pm the delivery guy rang the doorbell, asked for a certain document and handed us our luggage. After staying in the sweaty studio apartment the whole day we were really relieved. We could finally re-start our holiday which however just had gotten one day shorter.

The end of the customer journey with LH.

So what, shit happens occasionally?

Why should the airline company place any value to this negative experience? How will this in practice affect their bottom line and brand experience?

First, we will try to avoid LH connecting flights in the future until we hear that there is some improvement. Second, whenever someone asks us anything related to LH we will share this negative experience with them. All the positive moments along the customer journey have been long forgotten.

As you can see, people don’t actually even need to ask anything because we are proactively sharing our story to our network. This way we influence other people who might embark on a similar journey and affect their decision making process. And that’s not all. The effect of poor CX doesn’t stop there. The message gets spread through our audience to their audience and so on. Not easy to measure but hopefully not impossible to grasp. And we are not the only ones. A research shows that as many as 95% share their poor experiences and 87% the good ones with others.

What could be done?

The logistics in huge airports must be extremely complex, but the delayed luggage is not the point here. The major thing missing is the empathy and the positive experience that would compensate the, sometimes inevitable, negative experience. The positive experience that would make us forget the preceding negative experience. The positive experience that would make us want to promote LH to our network and do some free marketing for the company.

How could a company then find out if their customer’s journey ends to a negative experience? By anticipating customer needs: listening to customer feedback from various channels and by doing customer research. In this case, the research would probably state that:

People feel pissed off and worried when they are in an unfamiliar city without their luggage
People hate wasting time on their holiday
People feel unappreciated when they are not given apologies nor compensation after being treated poorly.

Once the company would have this problem clearly in mind, they would do some workshopping for solutions. Probably they would come up with solutions like:

Empower the service rep to be apologetic and provide him tools for that
Provide the traveller a well designed survival kit including the most important stuff for one night
Be proactive and provide realistic schedules for the luggage return. If this is not possible say it. Never give false estimates and hope for the best.
Compensate the loss by providing e.g. a gift certificate to a partner restaurant.

These are just examples and hopefully the company comes up with much more innovative solutions after some research. As you can see, it wouldn’t require huge investments. Especially from a company that is committed to being a 5-star airline and states that customer satisfaction is a cornerstone in their corporate strategy.

Oh and one more thing. LH lost our luggage also in return to Helsinki.