Trains, planes and troubles or A passenger is a person too
My favourite quote (possibly misattributed) is this from Maya Angelou:
I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
In late August 2016 I’m in a pretty important workshop with one of my favourite clients. We slog through content improvements for their social media and their website and even briefly discuss their radio station, I think. I’ve done some stuff it’s a good idea to do in workshops: put my Mac down to work with them without distractions. Switched off my phone.
I am fully unaware that a few minutes after I step into that room, my father dies suddenly and completely unexpectedly in an emergency department. Nobody is there with him. I step out of the room and start down the street to head back to the office, and I switch my phone on. I have so many unanswered calls. Just an endless list of people I know and don’t know who have tried to reach me.
So that’s how I find out.
And in that state, I meet a lot of people who are not just themselves, but represent a company.
I get fined on the train, because I’m trying to get to where my father is and my mother is, but I have failed to understand I need a ticket. I’m on the phone a lot and try to talk to a lot of people and make a lot of stuff happen, and my battery dies, and the ticket app is on the stupid phone and I am just loose in the world like an untethered balloon, pretty much floating on the wind powerless to change my own direction, which is an alien and wooshy sort of feeling and it’s just too much for me to keep track of, this app ticket phone battery thing.
I don’t recall exactly how I react to this, because it’s a tiny, stupid thing in a day with no room at all for tiny, stupid things. I probably cry but I was already crying. And I pay the fine right away — I know this because I’ve kept the receipt. My foremost concern is whether I have to get off the train, because it is absolutely vital that I am not hindered, I’m a mess on a mission here.
I’m told I don’t have to get off, but pretty brusquely, I think. I have the very distinct impression I fucked up in some important way.
When I think back to this over a year later, I feel deeply ashamed about that whole ticket fiasco. I also don’t feel too friendly towards the train company. I think they kind of suck. I have started perceiving them as somehow just an itsy bitsy bit malicious and ruthless. If my train is late, I am not sympathetic.
They redesigned their website recently. It can do some great things! It remembers where I usually travel from and where I tend to travel to. It has some super cute illustrations I think nobody really noticed, and it’s very easy to book a ticket. It has not changed the way I feel about them at all. If they want to fix their relationship with me they have to change how the people who show up to be them on their trains and in their stations act. It will still take a lot of time.
Let’s fast forward to almost exactly one year later. I am in a workshop! It’s pretty important. It’s with some of my favourite clients. I am all the way across the country, with my colleague Daniel.
I have not let my phone out of sight — or turned it off to be considerate—in, you know, one year. So when that same emergency department phones me about my mother, I get to hear about her straight away.
Don’t worry: my mother isn’t dead (in fact, she is still alive and feeling much better when I am writing this). She is, however, very, very ill and might die. The mess on a mission is back.
I meet a lot of people who are not just themselves, but represent a company this time as well.
I have to get on a different plane than planned and I am stressed and traumatised. I am really not very good at focusing on how stuff works on planes or in life in this exact situation, so I am doing a lot of stuff wrong. I am probably looking more than a bit shellshocked. But nobody yells at me. The steward fusses over to me with a bottle of water and hot coffee and a blanket, and he doesn’t even ask me what’s wrong or why I am acting all super weird and unpredictable.
He sees an upset person that is on his plane and cares for that person. His customer. Some woman in 6F. It doesn’t matter to him if I am feeling sick or if I am scared of flying or if I am having one of the top 5 worst days of my life. He clearly considers it his job to put me at ease when I am distressed.
They have the most godawful website, this airline. It’s difficult to do almost anything people can predictably want to do on an airline website. But the only thing they need to fix for me to love them is their website. I feel like they are nice. I feel like when they fuck up, they are just people trying their best, and someone made them an ugly website and it’s probably not their fault and it’s not that big a deal anyway (but please, for the love of god, fix it, SAS!). I am not trying to put myself out of work here, but having a crap website or an annoying app is a much simpler thing to fix than the impression that a company is (slightly) evil.
I recommend having great digital channels that make it easy for people to do really obvious things (for an an airline, people probably want to go somewhere on one of their planes). And yet it is worth nothing if companies are not willing to do the work to make sure the people who answer phones, meet customers, reply to emails and messages and show up every day treat customers like people, not problems. Great website design is not a band-aid on poor organisational design.
It’s impossible to not fail at least a little bit. Stuff gets in the way: Someone has a bad day, because even the train people are human beings (I guess), and businesses get caught up in other stuff to ensure their growth or survival, and there’s money and profit models and this and that.
But people make their judgments about businesses they encounter when something doesn’t work. And they feel they see clearly and truly right then, and remember how they were made to feel for a very long time. Businesses have customers like me—sad, confused and a bit vulnerable—every day. If the service is at its worst when I’m at my worst, it’s probably not going to be a great experience for anyone involved.
So how to fix that is easy in principle and difficult in real life: People first. “Surely you can’t mean we should rig our entire organisation around people with dying parents.” Well — kind of. Use empathy. Be kind. Apologize when things just go to hell because they do, sometimes. But care for people first. Make a great website and a fantastic app like fourth. Or fifth.
