Is Customer Experience Easy? Yes, and No.

Relieved, I inhaled deeply the already-stale air on board the Air Canada Jazz flight from Houston to Toronto. My dash from the other terminal would have done a Jamaican sprinter proud. But I had made my impossible connection, and as a consequence would get home before midnight.

Tucked away at the back, I surveyed the familiar scene: weary business travelers playing with blackberries in the last moments before takeoff, flight attendants demonstrating the use of seatbelts to an audience that studiously ignored their existence. As the sweat dried in my armpits and I recovered my breath, I realized I was hungry. Knowing there was no point in fishing around in my bag for a snack that did not exist, I waited.

A little later, I watched the food cart as it made its painfully slow way down the aisle, anticipating one of those chicken wraps: normally a bland, overpriced combination of chicken and lettuce, but in my hunger-crazed imagination a gastronomic delight. And when the cart finally reached me, I smiled broadly at the attendant – whose name, I later learned, was Sue – and asked for the item in question.

A shadow of genuine disappointment crossed her face as she explained to me that the last sandwich had just been sold, and was there anything else she could help me with? Suppressing the growling in my stomach, I shrugged and said I would have a granola bar and a beer – in the absence of nutrition, settling for anything that would fill the yawning internal cavern.

“But wait”, she said, “I can give you my crew sandwich from my own bag”. Touched, and a bit embarrassed, by such a generous offer, I said no, no, thanks, I was fine, and asked for another granola bar. She insisted. I insisted it wasn’t necessary – but thanks! The cart continued its steady course, while I settled into my dinner of beer and two granola bars.

Shortly afterwards, a still-contrite Sue came by and shamefacedly explained that someone had already taken her crew sandwich, but presented me with a handful of crackers and cheese from her bag. In the face of such personal treatment, my hunger disappeared and was replaced by a sense – rarely encountered in economy air travel – that someone really cared about me. The imagined chicken wrap, which had only a few minutes earlier loomed like a vision before me, dissolved away and was forgotten.

That was it. The lesson: a little humanity can turn a bad experience into a wonderful one. Easy. Just like that.

But there’s a postscript to the story. I was so moved that I emailed Air Canada to commend Sue’s selflessness. Shortly afterwards, I received an automated response that my “concern” would be dealt with within 15 business days. Soon afterwards, I received an apologetic message from Brian at Air Canada, explaining that inevitably they ran out of food from time to time, and thanking me for my comments. And would I accept a discount on my next flight? Of course I would – but I was far from aggrieved. It seemed that Air Canada was not accustomed to receiving positive comments about its flight attendants and was a bit perplexed about how to deal with me.

The problem was that I had deviated from the script – as had Sue. There is no doubt that the management of Air Canada would love to have every passenger disembark with the same warm glow I had as we touched down in Toronto. But Sue’s behavior came from the heart and could not be scripted, or predicted, or taught in customer service workshops.

Many aspects of customer experience are like this: easy to do in a specific instance, but tough to implement on a broader scale.

A few weeks ago, I sold my house and in the course of the move notified my cable provider, Rogers, that I would need to cancel the service. No problem, I was told: just return the TV converter when you are ready. Being a little anxious about the move, I returned it a few days before leaving my home – reasoning that I was so busy that I would not have time to watch TV. The adolescent at the Rogers store politely accepted the converter and told me that I would need to drop by with the internet modem too. Again, no problem, or so I thought: I would drop this by after the move, as I would still need to be online over the next few days.

Yet this was not to be. When I returned that evening, my home internet had been shut down. What the clerk had failed to mention was that, by handing in my TV converter, I had automatically cancelled the account. After a long, angst-filled call to Rogers, I was told that nothing that could be done to reverse this. The system had its own momentum, beyond the reach of mere humans. I had no sense that the staff actually cared about this major inconvenience to me at a critical time – after all, I was cancelling my account, so why should they care?

It would have been so easy to inform me that my internet account was being cancelled. And, in principle, it should have been easy to reverse the cancellation when I called and complained. Yet it was hard.

In the case of both Air Canada and Rogers, it seemed that individuals and the system were in conflict. In a positive way, Sue’s preparedness to circumvent the system confused Air Canada’s customer service centre; while the call centre staff at Rogers (whose names I, thankfully, quickly forgot) helplessly shrugged and pleaded there was nothing they could do.

Yet there are companies who work hard to make the system empower, rather than emasculate, the service staff. At Ritz Carlton Hotels, if a guest problem with plumbing is communicated to a housemaid, she has the power to, and is expected to, take the necessary steps to resolve the issue. Staff cruise the hallways wearing Bluetooth earpieces, in constant communication about the guest experience. Each member of staff carries a “credo card” which summarizes Ritz-Carlton’s core beliefs and is reviewed daily in the quest for an improved customer experience.

The human touch is the heart of the customer experience. But the system matches it beat for beat, supporting it, and strengthening it. Too many organizations find this too hard, suffering from an arrhythmia that drives customers away. Yes, customer experience is hard. But easy, too, when you get the system right.

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