Alienation Through Digitalisation
Enrique Fernandez-Pino
Leader of Digital and Business Change. Interim and Fractional CIO and Digital Transformation Director.
When it comes to digitalisation, there is a significant difference between lack of digitalisation (which tends to lead to frustration) and bad digitalisation (which often leads to full-blown alienation). Let me explain myself…
Back in September 2019, I published an article explaining my frustration about the lack of digitalisation in the car rent industry (https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/we-picking-rent-car-airport-yey-enrique-fernandez-pino/). In the article I explained how every time I rented a car, I needed to waste a ton of time on paperwork. Even when doing this very regularly. At the same airport. With the same companies. Leading to big queues. Funny how in late 2022, and,?in spite of Covid, this is pretty much still the case and, when I landed in Madrid ten days ago for my Christmas break with the family, queues were pretty much the same length as in 2019. With the same amount of paperwork. The lack of digitalisation always frustrates me. But it won’t stop me renting a car at the airport next time I travel.
However, bad digitalisation will. Let me use British Airways as an example. Their web site sells tickets both for their own planes, as well as for Iberia Airlines. But in spite of 11 (yes, eleven) years operating as a consortium under IAG, they will not check-in Iberia flights. Even if they have sold the ticket.
I don’t know if you’ve been to Gatwick South lately, but BA’s check-in is now fully digitalised. All machines. No people. 7.00am and slightly late for our Christmas flight, we try to check-in luggage for our British Airways ticket sold by British Airways on their British Airways web site and paid to the British Airways merchant (but 'operated by Iberia' in very small letters). Tapped the ticket reference in the BA machine and all we get is “we don’t recognise this ticket”. No further advice, no recognition of a ticket that they have sold. And, what’s worse, no humans. None whatsoever. Nobody with a BA uniform in the whole area to refer the problem to. Running now very late for our flight, anxiety was raising. Until my lovely wife looked at the electronic ticket, realised that it was operated by Iberia (good job we do this regularly), and had the best of ideas: why don’t we go to the Iberia’s counter at the other side of the terminal? Which we did. And there, a flesh and bone human managed to fix our problem, boarding passes issued, luggage in the haul. Hooray. Still time for a takeaway coffee on our way to the gate. Unlike the car rent, the difference on this occasion, is that I didn’t feel frustrated. I felt full-blown alienated by a 'digitalised' British Airways. And very grateful to Iberia for their non-digital human help. Guess what? From this point, whenever we have to go Madrid, we will buy from EasyJet or Iberia (even Ryanair) and not from BA. We have a customer choice and we have exercised it. In fact, I'm travelling to Madrid again in late January, and this time I chose Iberia Airlines. Their bad digitalisation have lost them a family of very regular travellers. Forever. ?
Having been involved in transformational change through technology and digitalisation for most of my career, this situation brought a few thoughts…
Marketing. If you market yourself as something, deliver something. Don’t market yourself as a consortium and then not invest on the technology to enable you to work as a consortium and fulfil your grand statement. Costumers will crush themselves with the reality of things, get incredibly confused, and end up alienated and moving to the competition.?
Design. When you design digital things, think them through, don't rush them. Consider the functionality and the potential real life scenarios experienced by real customers. Don’t let your digital team and consultants convince you to accept a sub-standard minimum viable product (MVP) unless this is true competition timely critical. Once you lose a customer, they are very unlikely to come back. If you design a machine that can’t recognise a ticket that you have sold, this is not an MVP. This a shoddy digital job. Period. ?
Test. Before going live, always make sure that comprehensive and painstakingly detailed tests are performed. Tests need to cover all bases, and be designed by somebody different to the individual or team that designed the digital product in the first place. Nobody is good at marking their own homework! If a customer service team had checked this product well, they should have spotted the flaw in the design and, as a minimum, introduced some advice: “for this ticket, please refer to an Iberia counter”, instead of the now classic “computer says no”.
Eat your own food. I am serious. If you fly private you will never be able to understand your customers needs. If your leaders can fly for free and don’t pay for their own tickets, or you give them special staff cards by which they get treated as VIPs at check-ins, they will never experience what your customer experience and they will never get alienated by badly designed machines. Make your leaders buy their own tickets, get their own customer experience and you’ll reduce significantly your changes of alienating those that feed your kids and pay your mortgage.?
Customer Service. Don’t allow your staff to assume that people know your processes. They are unlikely to know them. When we asked the lady at the Iberia counter what was the problem, she simply said “well, you can’t check-in an Iberia flight on a BA desk, everybody knows that”. Except that we didn’t. And it made me feel somewhere in between stupid and patronised. Always train your customer service staff to assume that the customer will not know anything. If they seek help is because they don’t know. Why would they otherwise? It really is that simple.?
Humans. At the risk of disappointing and probably upsetting 'digital gurus' across the land, let me be clear: like with toddlers, we are years away from a place where we can leave computers roam free unsupervised. Perhaps decades. Whenever you digitalise an operation, there has to be a fall back plan in case the machine is not well designed, or goes loopy. Which they do. This is the very reason why supermarkets keep staff around self-service checkouts, and rail stations keep staff around the gate lines. If computer says no and there’s no staff to help, it will be the last time you’ll see that customer...
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In summary, my advice is to either do digitalisation well, investing time, effort, capital, and more importantly, common sense, or don't do it. Bad digitalisation may simply kill your business. ?
If you need help thinking or developing your strategy for ticketing, or need project direction for its execution, please do not hesitate to contact me or visit my website: www.simplerchange.co.uk
For more tips on Business and Digital Change, please feel free to have a look at my published book SIMPLIFYING CHANGE:
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https://tinyurl.com/Simplifying-Change
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NED, Strategy Specialist and Operational Quality, Governance & Assurance Expert
1 年Enrique, brilliantly written! Sorry you had to experience all that while on your way for your Christmas break. When companies approach digitisation as a ‘cutting cost’ exercise perhaps -let’s remove humans from airport terminals, the impact is far more detrimental to their growth strategy of having partnerships.
Communications Officer at OCMS
1 年Great travel story Enrique Fernandez-Pino - I had the exact same issue this summer with my Iberia ticket issued by BA. -- But I doubt if your boycott is forever. Memories are short and when needs must, and BA presents the best travel option (i.e. time of day), you will succomb. Plus Easyjet and Ryannair (especially in their post Covid guise) are also quite capable of delivering poor customer service (if not digitisation).
Director, Head of CTAS (Cyber Technical Advisory Services) & Account Chief Information Security Officer
1 年Couldn’t agree more Enrique. Throughout their existence Virgin Trains tried passionately to put the customer at the centre of the experience, look at the difference that made during the judicial review of the award process in 2012. Do it right and your customers are loyal. Get it wrong and you’ve lost them forever.
FTSE and Government Chief Digital and Information Officer, CIO, Board Strategy Advisory, Mentor
1 年So true. You mentioned supermarkets. My local tesco introduced fully automated, no human, tills, for your big shopping (not the small ones which don't work anyway). I am convinced they did that, not because they cared about user experience (which was dreadful) but because they were trying to reduce staff. As a result, after a while we all stopped using them, a campaign started on the local fb page to take them out, and they had to. God, and they, know how much money was wasted...