Richard FoutsThis story truly represents the perfect storm – of the bad experience – where the customer, the employee and the provider — all collided. In this case, both employee and customer were having a bad day – on the same day. The timing was perfect.
Both came face-to-face with their own break points – the end of their respective ropes; they both encountered straws that broke the backs of their respective camels. Whatever cliché you call it, both customer and customer-service-representative hit that “postal” moment at the same time, against the backdrop of the provider (in this case JetBlue, who engineered the perfect environment for the perfect storm to occur in the first place).
So what can we as marketers learn from the Steve Slater story? “It’s about the experience, stupid.” Not just the customer experience – but the employee experience. Something providers overlook.
Let’s start with the customer. Airlines have made the travel experience so appalling that it’s no wonder passengers “hit the wall.” I’m not defending the bad passenger mind you, just explaining it. It happens with any business – a customer hits the wall because the provider sees everything from its own point of view. It’s about their rules, their process and what they need to do to transfer money from our pocket to theirs. Or they turn customer requests down because “the computer won’t let me do that.”
Customer service people hit the wall because customers just don’t get it. They keep telling customers their “inside-out” story and get hugely frustrated when customers don’t seem to hear it. So they say, “take this job and shove it.” And they say things like, “customers are idiots” under their breath – while the customer also calls them the same names.
But there’s a third party to all of this – the provider who is responsible for engineering the environment for both experience types, good or bad, to occur. In their defense, JetBlue competes on the experience, and they did a good job of it in their early days. But of course, Virgin Air is now eating their lunch, by going one better. So one wonders if JetBlue has lost its experience mojo.
What Virgin gets – is that happy employees create happy customers. Its employees are as evangelical about working at Virgin Air as their customers are about flying Virgin Air.
One of my clients, Informatica gets this too. They have extremely happy customers, as evidenced by their renewal rate (because a customer isn’t really a customer until they come back). And Informatica customers don’t just agree to be customer references, they practically demand it. Informatica employees are also enormously happy, as evidenced by their low turnover and internal surveys. They’ve figured out you can’t have one without the other. Happy employees create happy customers. Unhappy employees? Well .. you get the picture…
I’m not saying JetBlue’s employee/customer experiences are no longer in harmony, rather using this story to educate marketers about the pending perfect storm. The dollars you dump into customer experience will be wasted if you aren’t looking with equal fervor at your employee experience as well. It’s not about putting a bunch of service features together, but understanding what customers go through – before and after they engage with you. It’s a much bigger picture than your own particular service environment. There are many things we all do to improve our service, but if we do it independently of the larger experience – we miss the nuances. As any experience designer will tell you, we have to craft SCENARIOS, not just service features.
But here’s the lesson of Steve Slater. In our zeal to understand the customer, we might be overlooking the experience of the employee that delivers the experience. It’s time to put the two together. We need to analyze the uber-experience.
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6 responses so far ↓
1 John Ryan August 11, 2010 at 8:41 pm
Richard,
Good points in this article. I was just commenting today how so many companies are in a race-to-the-bottom pricing mentality which leads to killing the goose that lays the egg. (this is happening in a number of industries) It’s interesting how connected all of this is and how the airlines in their pricing models may just be responding to the call of corporations who want to get more out of less all the time which of course diminishes the service and the overall quality of passengers. Most passengers are pretty good, but some of them act like the asylum let them out for the day.
When it’s all about price and speed, sooner or later all employees jump on their own escape slide and get out because life is short. I thought grabbing the beer was a nice touch.
Overall, I think Jet Blue is a good airline and Virgin is the coolest way to fly hands down.
Cheers,
John
http://www.thedigitalbuyer.com
2 Rich DiGirolamo August 13, 2010 at 9:38 am
From one Rich to another………thank you, thank you, thank you!
There seems to be this debate going on; along the lines of which came first the chicken or the egg; that being who is more important the customer or the employee.
It’s the employee, Stupid!
Your #1 P&L line item is probably your people. Enough said?
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4 Richard Fouts August 13, 2010 at 3:06 pm
A point we often forget, although why I’ll never know .. since, as you note, it’s our #1 P&L line item. I’ve worked with clients that shudder at the thought of making the employee experience better .. because they default to “they are lucky to have jobs.”
It’s an attitude that is exacerbated of course in bad economies. I’m not saying JetBlue is guilty of this, but the conditions under which flight attendants work — packed planes, full runways, late takeoffs, lousy food, cramped seating, unhappy children – none of it is engineered to create a good travel experience for the customer – and flight attendants aren’t miracle workers.
We are packed into these tubes like sardines – preceded by a cattle call. The flight attendant’s starting point is already on the minus side before the plane takes off.
5 Chris Boorman August 14, 2010 at 4:26 pm
Richard,
Thankyou for your kind comments about Informatica. You are correct in stating that the experience comes down to employees and customers working well together.
The customer must always come first – no matter what. Our job and role is life is to help our customers to be successful. To do this one must always think about the customer “first” and to think “outside in”. By focusing on the customer you begin to behave in a way that drives a good experience for them.
However, in order to do this, you need a culture of “customer success” and employees have a major role to play in “walking the walk” as opposed to “talking the talk”. I think Informatica gets this from both sides.
Regards
Chris
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