Herb Kelleher, founder, and longtime leader of Southwest Airlines tells a story about his sister-in-law who called him on Thanksgiving of their first year (they started that June).
She reminded him that she had flown every airline under the sun (and this was true), and she told him she knew he was going to make it because “You have the best in-flight service.”
He said, “Wow, am I happy to hear that. How many others were on the flight with you?”
And she said, “Just me!”
via How I Built This
Five stars! It feels good to get that positive review. That’s the feedback you’ve been working towards from the start. But real customer experience needs to answer two questions in the affirmative.
- Is the Customer Experience good?
- Does the Customer Experience scale?
If it’s good and doesn’t scale, you’ve got grandma’s pot roast. Damn fine cooking and no better service on the planet, but it takes all day and only makes one lap around the table.
On the flip side, if it scales but isn’t good, you’ve got corn nuts.
If you are already in business, you can use this to see if you should be. How are you serving your customers, and do you have a path to improve at scale?
Starbucks fell into this trap as they pushed into new markets and more than doubled their size from 2003 – 2008. They were scaling the business, but they were not scaling the customer experience. Quality was falling off.
Did these baristas know how to craft the beverage? While making small talk with customers? Like Howard Schultz had observed on his trips to Italy?
That was the culture they promised and charged for, but it’s not what customers were receiving. McDonalds even felt they could carve out a portion of the market with a drive through McCafe.
You know the experience is lacking when customers are leaving you for a coffee with the essence of Big Mac.
It got bad enough that Starbucks closed down 7,100 cafes for 3.5 hours on the afternoon of February 26th, 2008. Espresso training. A bold move that made headlines. Trading out millions in revenue to get their service back on track told customers that things were going to improve.
Hang with us, we are working on it. We are making it a priority.
It worked. The baristas that are typically so busy blending Frappuccino’s to work on their coffee craft got much needed training, improved the product and service, and Starbucks hasn’t looked back.
“If you’ve got the money honey and I’ve got the time”
Lefty Frizzell
Any business can fall into this trap. New employees have time but don’t have the skill, once they have the skill, they don’t have the time.
Customer Experience can’t just be great because of extra bandwidth. Because things are slow. It needs to be great because you have scalable and repeatable systems. Those systems allow you to build a brand that extends past the capabilities of a few all-star employees.
The trick is making customers feel that love, even on a full flight.
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