?? Are we Living in a Golden Age of Customer Experience?

‘It’s absolute f*****g chaos!’

If you’ve seen my LinkedIn recently, or frankly been anywhere within earshot of me, you’ll know I’ve been doing an unusual amount of travelling. A mixture of holidays, presentations, and some super-interesting projects at The Foundation have meant more time than usual out and about. It’s fair to say I’m not popular at home.

I heard this opening line whilst in the Passport Control queue at Heathrow Airport, and contrary to what the originator probably intended, it made me think just how amazing some of our customer experiences have become.

Let me set the scene. We’ve just got off a nine-hour flight from India. That flight has arrived precisely on time, and we’re off the plane within minutes. As we approach Passport Control, we get guided by a smiling member of staff to the self-scan machine. Here, there are ten separate queues, for each of the ten machines.

You have to sort yourself into one or other of them, and it’s this mild request for some individual responsibility that caused the consternation of the angry-faced traveller behind me. But after no more than two minutes waiting, I walked forward, scanned my passport, smiled at the camera, and was let back into Blighty. Or into another duty-free shop spraying me with perfume, to be precise.

That’s amazing, isn’t it?

I remember when it wasn’t uncommon (and it still can be common) to expect an hour’s wait at Heathrow to get your passport checked. Or one time on holiday in Cuba, having waited for ages in one queue, the agent decided to close up his door and go on a break, leaving us to fight and merge into the not-too-happy queue next to ours - who’s agent promptly decided to shut his for a break, too.

That really was f*****g chaos.

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Now, I know I can often come across as a bit… cynical? Grumpy?... about current-day customer experience. But it’s also right to recognise the incredible advances in the experiences we do have, which I think are most obvious when travelling.

Take our family holiday to Denmark, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. All of our tickets, from flights to activities, were pre-loaded onto my phone before leaving the house. At the resort, one wristband opened and closed the doors to our lodge, let us book and pay for anything we wanted to do, and locked our lockers (as well as reminding us where the lockers were when we forgot the numbers).

More impressively, though, was on the train. Denmark is a remarkably tidy country, with bags on the train for you to put your rubbish in and take with you. The problem was, I couldn’t understand what it said, what I was meant to do with it. So, I grabbed my phone, opened Google translate, scanned the words, and within seconds knew the rules.

Similarly, on a work trip to Singapore, my flight neighbour told me to download Grab app, a Singaporean version of Uber. Within minutes – and for the rest of my stay there – I essentially had an on-demand chauffeur service, a car that would arrive almost instantly and take me anywhere I wanted to go, without me having to stand with my arm out or reach for my wallet once. It even helped me pay for food in the Hawker markets, which didn’t accept contactless but would accept mobile app payments.

And for the spare few hours I had to sight-see? My cousin simply sent me a link to a two-hour tourist walk he’d planned when he visited a few months ago. One click, and it was loaded onto my phone. One more, and my watch was buzzing me in the right direction. Hungry for lunch? A few swipes and I’m heading to the most recommended place in the area.

But on reflection, do these things make incredible customer experiences, or are we just tinkering around the edges? Have we been investing in, and distracted by, shiny new things at the expense of what customers really care about? Things like how the Uber driver treats you and drives, once they’ve picked you up, what support you get when a payment you’ve made goes wrong, or how long the queues are when you’ve scanned your wristband to get into a theme park.

After all, as I sit on this plane writing, this has just arrived for me to eat. And to be honest, I think I’d rather go back to paper tickets and long passport queues.

Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed it, please do share. And if you need any help with improving your organisation’s customer experience or creating a more customer-led organisation, come and find me and the team at The Foundation.