In the book Rethink I spent a lot of time discussing the importance of being really good at delivering what your customer values, and really ignoring or not caring about the parts that the customer doesn’t value (or won’t cause your customer to take their business elsewhere).
I use the example of the cable company that has horrible customer service, we have essentially come to expect it, and most of us don’t call or cable company very often so even though we have a bad experience 100% of the time, it’s usually not enough to cause us to cancel our cable subscription and move to another provider (in part because we expect the same crummy customer service from the next provider). But there is intelligence in there. If a necessary service is applied uniformly across an industry (that is, “how” they provide customer service in this case), then there is no differentiation in that area. One might argue that if one of the cable companies invested to provide world class customer service that they would get all of the customers to rush to them, but I doubt it, since that’s not the most valuable thing people go to them for – it’s the cable.
So when I read the article New Aerial Irritant: No Items in Seat Back, by Joe Sharkey in the New York Times, while I agreed with the specific point, I thought Sharkey missed the bigger problem with air travel these days.
For most of us, there are probably only a handful of things that heavily influence our decision with respect to which airline, and which flight, to select. Price, timing, and frequent flier miles are probably the top three if I had to guess, and whatever is fourth is a distant fourth. Quality isn’t really a differentiator, food isn’t any more (it used to be for Alaska Airlines), we don’t care about the check in process, luggage isn’t handled any better or any worse than anyone, all of the seats are too tiny, and there’s always a competition for space in the overhead compartments. So why is travel such a pain? Because “how” everyone does all of these things is different. Even TSA (the security people) apply security standards differently in different airports (both the rigor of the use of X-rays and the application of the four ounce rule – get a scale), just as Sharkey points out that different airlines enforce this (annoying) rule about not allowing us to put anything in seat backs, differently.
Especially for things I could not care less about, it is a pain to have to figure out “how” the airline du jour is going to handle things on that day, what I am going to get scolded for, what trick I don’t know about, etc. That really makes travel a pain and I wish the airlines would figure out a way to standardize “how” they do the stuff that we don’t care about. I expect that would also make the flight attendants less hostile.
-Ric
P.S. And airlines – when it comes to “how” you board flights, when the flight is really full, please don’t announce that to the waiting area, it only makes things worse – people act as though they aren’t going to get a seat and rush to the door.
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