Could Customer Experience have saved the French Bulldog on the United Airlines Flight?
Remember the time when a 10-month old French Bulldog died on a United Airlines flight because its carrier was placed inside an overhead compartment as instructed by a United flight attendant? In fact, after the incident, research showed that out of the 506,994 animals that flew on U.S. commercial air carriers in 2017, 24 died in transit, with 75% of those deaths occurring on United Airlines.
If that incident does not come to mind, remember the time when an older Asian gentleman, who was also a doctor, was thrown off an overbooked flight even though he had a perfectly valid ticket? When the world expected an apology, the CEO of United Airlines Oscar Munoz said that the crew was only following standard protocol. Now, even my 11 year old knows that is not the correct answer. Social Media went into an uproar after the incident and the CEO’s reaction to it, resulting in the airline losing $1.3 billion in market value in a single day! This, from the world’s 3rdlargest airline in terms of revenue and one that has a 7/7 safety rating by source Airline Ratings. All in all, a disastrous customer experience.
So what exactly is customer experience? Expected to reach $21.3 billion by 2024, rising at a market growth of 22% CAGR, customer experience has become so important that it was the focus and theme of this year’s global Adobe Summit, featuring how companies can transform their existing businesses by focusing on crafting memorable customer experiences.
Customer Experience, defined as a sum total of customer service, product quality and that intangible way that customers feel about the companies they do business with, has become one of the key deciding factors whether a brand will be able to retain a customer or not. The number of companies that are competing primarily on the basis of customer experience has skyrocketed from 36% in 2010 to 89% today.
How many companies believe that they deliver exceptional customer experiences? United was definitely one that believed they do and so do 80% of companies who will vouch that they deliver super customer experiences, but that 8% of customers agree. That is a large gap between perception and reality and one that is an opportunity for newer brands like Casper, Airbnb or Quip to capture.
Customer Experience Management or CEM is the process of putting together a set a practices and technologies to ensure continuous transformation within a company or organization with the sole purpose of meeting and exceeding customer expectations. In other words, while many may tout that they are ‘customer-centric’, this is the practice of ensuring that the entire organization is working towards offering a cohesive, one-message, brand experience that has been tailored for the only person who matters to the business — the ‘customer’
In a world that is become less offline and more online, less touch-and-feel and more automated, less personal and more overhead driven, the importance of customer experience has taken center stage. It has moved from the agenda that rested solely on the back of the CMO to take critical space in the boardroom, becoming an integral of business strategies and implementation plans. The Customer Experience runs the gamut of the entire customer journey and thus becomes the mandate of the entire organization to work on bridging the gap between brands and customers, resulting in improving retention, loyalty and in many cases, perhaps, even turning customers into advocates.
Covering call centers, email, eCommerce and other web services including apps, the offline/online stores, global branches and of course the gamut of social media channels, events, tradeshows, samplings, third-party agreements, Customer Experience covers it all. Everything a brand does, whether within the organization or outside including marketing, advertising, research etc., all play a vital role in the brand’s perception in the consumer’s mind. There is no room anymore for a brand to hide behind any one of its functions. It can no longer say that it has a great product and so it’s ok if people are complaining about their return policy. In other cases, especially when the company’s roots are brick and mortar, it may, for example, have a hard time offering the latest growth opportunity SOPIS (Shop-Online-Pick-Up-In-Store) because their offline and online stores are set up as two separate business units. But nobody told the customer, so when the customer bought something from the store or online, to her it was ONE brand experience, disjointed as she later found to her dismay!
In an always-on, constantly-connected environment, offering a cohesive, working customer experience across the entire customer journey has become the single most important investment that a brand can make today.
Here’s an example of a recent breakdown in customer experience. I am a T-Mobile customer. T-Mobile offers something called T-Mobile Tuesdays that are a moment of surprise joy for customers, available every Tuesday. It can be something as small as a free coffee in association with Dunkin Donuts, a free taco in association with Taco Bell or T-Mobile branded swag such as socks or umbrellas. It can only be redeemed on Tuesdays, via the app and both my kids and I have a lot of fun saving our offers so that we can redeem them anytime during the week. This week, my kids wanted to have tacos from Taco Bell. When they went in to redeem the offer, this was the experience:
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- Click to save offer
2. When ready to redeem, click to see a form that needs a name, phone number, address to open a Taco Bell account, when redirected to the Taco Bell app
3. When you are ready to redeem your ‘free’ taco, choose it from a menu that has 20 other confusing options, click it, choose the location, and enter your credit card information
4. Remember when I said ‘free’ taco? On no, you can’t just go in and show it on your app; you have to enter your credit card information, order it, choose the location, say you will pick up in store and then wait for them to find your order by name or order number
5. The last 3 times, the Taco Bell was not able to retrieve the order from the order number, the app, the name or the credit card information.
A couple of things come to mind when you hear this customer experience (and remember this is the experience of only one customer). One, there is absolutely no correlation between the online information collection and the offline order collection which is a reflection of a breakdown in the CRM or Customer Relationship Management experience. Two, its great that the brand wants all my information but how did you assume that I wanted to start a relationship with your brand without coming to the conclusion whether I like you or not? What if this was my very first interaction with Taco Bell? This is like going on a blind date and telling your date that you would like them to meet your parents!
Frustrated with the Taco Bell experience, I posted a complaint on Twitter. It has been more than 24 hours and I am still waiting to hear back from someone.
Taco Bell posted same-store sales growth of 2%, compared with the expected 2.7% in 2018, and I am going to assume that 2019 will look no different. In a world with more choices and commoditized offerings, a brand no longer has the luxury of getting it wrong. This is a broken customer experience at several levels and the reason why the company does not realize how broken it is, is because nobody on their team has gone through the entire customer experience. Problems like this do not come up in boardrooms but on the street, which is the litmus test of getting the experience right! Earlier, customers could only communicate with companies in a limited number of ways such as customer services, writing letter or walking into a store. Today, the first mode of complaint is social, which means that the world has seen and heard of the broken customer experience even before the company has. Customers expect to be heard and replied back to, regardless of the channel they are using. And that remains true for every category be it B2C, B2B and B2B2C.
Here’s another example. Nike, the highly successful shoemaker realized that fit was a big friction point for its customers. Customers were going online and ordering multiple pairs of the same style shoe in different sizes, to better access the size that fits and return those that didn’t. Nike realized that many customers might not even know their shoe size leading to a lot of guessing. In fact, some may even have their feet in two completely different sizes.
“We reached a point of realizing this was not just the biggest problem but biggest transformational opportunity that we have. … No matter how good the shoe is, if the foot doesn’t fit well within the shoe, you’re not going to get peak performance from it.” Said Michael Martine, Nike’s global head of digital products. To solve this, Nike recently launched an augmented reality app called Nike Fit. It will scan your feet and determine your foot’s correct size so you can order the right sneaker. The app will roll out this July in North America, this August in Europe and to international markets soon after. The way the company solved this problem and turned it into an opportunity is just one example of why Nike remains, by far, one of the most successful shoemakers in the world.
Whether it is the failed customer experiences of United airlines and Taco Bell or the successful one of Nike that came out of a real need, there is no doubt that Customer Experience Management is the only way to win, retain and grow customers today. According to Forrester, close to 72% of business say that customer experience is their priority. The time, then, to change that broken experience, is now.
Next week, I will dive into some of the ways that companies can better understand the customer journey to offer a cohesive, friction-free and joyful customer experience across the entire length of the customer journey.
Join me every week, as we navigate these ever-changing waters to make sense of this ‘always-on’, ‘always-connected’ consumer and the technologies that define their everyday. I will be bringing you insights from some of the sharpest global minds in the industry as well as in academia. And do join the conversation.
Until next week
Anika
Anika Sharma
A seasoned Advertising and Digital expert, Anika has worked across countries and continents and spoken at companies such as Google and universities such as New York University. She is currently Professor of Business at New York University’s Stern School of Business, teaching Digital marketing, Social Media, Mobile and Digital Strategy. Follow Anika on twitter @anikadas.
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