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According to an article on Chicagobreakingnews.com, “Fifty new computer tourism “kiosks” will be installed throughout O’Hare International Airport” to replace recently laid-off greeters. 

The article emphasizes the economic benefits to the new system.  While it is a sure way to save on expenses, there are other customer issues to explore.

Possible CE Benefits

•          Since these kiosk computers can store an enormous amount of information, customers are more likely to get accurate, up-to-date information
•          Many customers (like me) prefer to use self-help technology than speak to humans (notice the popularity of the grocery store self-check-out)
•          Airports could potentially track the kind of information accessed by users and use that information to create better and more user-friendly communications

Questions to Consider

•          Can these kiosks replace the translation services that greeters formerly provided?  What languages will be offered?
•          How frequently will the information be updated?  Will they use the data gathered to improve future communication?
•          What are the contingencies in case of an emergency situation?
•          What about the environmental design?  Are these kiosks easy to find and use?
•          What if someone requires help or gets stuck?  Is there some personal backup?

Kiosks also pose many concerns that directly affect the customer experience (as Vox President, Jeannie Walters outlines in her Woman vs Machine Blog Series). How clean are they? How secure do users feel?  Where are they located within the building?

The bottom line is that providing more information in a new way can be great, but you can’t just put up a kiosk and assume that everything will be fine.

Follow Peggy on Twitter: www.twitter.com/entrop

My best friend’s older brother graduated from high school 2 years early and went to Harvard on a full-ride scholarship. He is now an international financial advisor, living abroad.  Her younger sister has a degree in physics from MIT.  But, sadly, my friend *ONLY* became an architect. 

We laugh about this a lot, because I consider her to be very successful, but she often comments on having middle-child syndrome. 

How hard do you have to try, then?  Is there a minimum standard of success that applies to everyone, across the board?

In the U.S. hotel industry, the system seems a little bit more clear-cut.  There are seemingly endless websites filled with customer feedback and ubiquitous star-ratings.  But how does all that translate into expectations?  

What are your expectations when you visit a hotel with a low star rating?

One hotel in New York claims that since they are a 1-star hotel, they shouldn’t be criticized for having “1-star standards” (like dead bodies and filthy rooms).  “What do you expect for $99.23 a night?”

But, if you talk to some people that regularly stay at 5-star hotels, their expectations may seem so astronomical that no hotel could ever exceed them. 

How important is it, then, to realize that all businesses aren’t judged by the same standards.  You have to understand what your customers expect and exceed those expectations consistently.

In response to my previous post, 3 Common Problems With Satisfaction Surveys, I received forwarded emails from Marriott Rewards and Hilton HHonors members. Both Marriott and Hilton are competing for the rank of Best Hotel Program in the Freddie Awards. So, each company sent emails in an attempt to convince customers to vote for them.  

Here’s a summary:

• Marriott says they have quick service, mobile access, better points redemption, and more flexibility
• Hilton offers free nights with no blackout dates, and claims to have more awards from J.D. Power and Associates
• I don’t care. Not even a little bit

The real question is: why should we, the customers, take the time to vote? Personally, I can’t think of a single reason. As a customer, I expect and tolerate marketing materials because that’s what companies do, and because it shows that they value my business. But these emails aren’t asking for my business, they’re asking for a favor.

Why should I rate you a 10?

• What do I get in return?
• How will your program improve if you win?
• Will prices go down?

Fun fact about the author:

I only give money to panhandlers who impress me with wit, talent, or ingenuity.

I recently spent a weekend visiting friends in Las Vegas, a city I lived in for many years and that I travel to often.  On my return flight, my friend introduced me to a fantastic thing.  McCarran Airport has housed a row of SpeedCheck kiosks since 2006. What makes these machines fantastic is that no matter what airline you are flying on, you can check in and print your boarding pass from one convenient machine!

One caveat of using SpeedCheck is that they provide no option for checking bags.  But I’ve noticed lately is that the vast majority of travelers are carrying on.  Airline fees have prompted people to opt to travel light whenever possible, and these kiosks could make their air travel even easier!

The biggest problem I saw with the kiosks was their “secret” location.  My friend took me to passenger pickup parking then instructed me to walk up the stairs to the second level, cross the bridge and go in the doors to the upper level.  Following these directions, I found myself in a secluded area lined with empty kiosks.  After quickly selecting Southwest Airlines and running my credit card to verify my identity, the machine popped out a neatly printed boarding pass and wished me a pleasant trip. 

I headed toward my gate, taking a moment to peek over the edge to the lower levels where hundreds of passengers were lined up at airline check-in counters or individual airline self-service kiosks.   It struck me as sad that more people didn’t know about the quick and easy upstairs check-in!  I’m glad someone finally taught me the secret handshake.

These machines definitely add a new level to the convenience factor, but as with single-airline check-in kiosks, the overall experience is still lacking.  Bad placement and few help functions create a real disconnect for customers.  With more careful and purposeful execution, they could do a lot to associate McCarran Airport with “easy travel,” which would be an important and profitable connection to make.  

I was recently in Houston, TX meeting with a potential client to see how we can help with their overall customer experience strategy. I flew in that morning and my return flight to Chicago was booked for 5:40 p.m. I arrived at the airport at 3:19 p.m. and noticed a 3:30 p.m. flight, so I hustled to E17 – of course the last gate of the wing – and arrived at the gate around 3:25 p.m. I was greeted by an attendant who said I was too late for the 3:30 p.m. flight. She also informed me that unfortunately, she wouldn’t have been able to help me anyway. Turns out, as of June 19, Continental Airlines doesn’t allow you to go directly to the departure gate and attempt to get on an earlier flight. If there’s room on an earlier flight, you have to go to the Service Center (way back at the entrance of the concourse), pay a $50 change fee and get a new ticket issued. 
 
I thought about this for a few minutes. On my morning flight to Houston, the attendants were begging passengers to give up their tickets because they overbooked the flight. They were offering a $250 flight voucher and a breakfast voucher for any passenger willing to take a later flight.
 
So here’s the deal…

Airlines intentionally overbook flights, making them painfully crowded, (with the new checked baggage fee on other airlines, the overhead bin situation is ridiculous) and then reserve the right to bump people at will. Then, they routinely offer $250+ in compensation to those willing to switch flights. Yet airlines charge passengers wanting to switch to an earlier, and not fully booked, flight $50.
 
Yep, makes perfect sense.
 
The irony is that I was happy with my Continental experience on the way to Houston – nice people, didn’t seem to be charging for strange things like a muffin or checked baggage…
 
But guess what I’ll tell people about now?
 
I’d like to sit in on some of the board meetings where they make these decisions. “You know what?  We could charge $50 to all those travelers who use up empty seats on earlier flights! What a great idea!” Arrrgh.

I recently vacationed at a beach resort in Mexico. Before leaving, I was stressed, tired and a little bored. I didn’t really plan the trip beforehand, so I just hoped to have a clean place to sleep and relax for a whole week.

Once in Cancun, I rented a crappy car and stayed in a crappy hotel. The infra-structure in some places was almost non-existent and the food was often too spicy for my taste. Nevertheless, the car was drivable, the room was clean, the water was clear, the weather was sunny and the nights were warm and full of excitement. I enjoyed every minute of it. I would go back in a heartbeat and I definitely recommend the experience to anyone.

But it’s funny how some people tell me about their really bad experiences in Cancun, under exactly the same conditions. What was different? They had higher expectations! For me, what was just another colorful experience to add to my memoirs was, to those other travelers, a tortured experience to blot from their memory. Because they expected everything about the trip to be great, the actual experience could only disappoint.

Now imagine your boss assigns you an important task. The task is due in five days, but you know you can do it in two. If you just accept the deadline and surprise her by delivering it three days ahead of time, you are remarkable. On the other hand, if you promise to deliver in two days, you reset her expectations, and when you make the shorter deadline, you become just a reliable resource. Now, what would happen if you finished two days before the original due date, but one day after your promised date? That’s right—you fail to meet her expectations and may be deemed untrustworthy.

In short, to have more you should to expect less!

As crazy as it sounds, it is basically true. But let’s rephrase it for the business world: to amaze your customers, you need to set the right expectations. But what is the right expectation? Different people have different expectations in different situations. In some industries, demands and circumstances may lead you to set very high expectations as a baseline (e.g., Target’s motto:“Pay LESS, Expect MORE.”). Even worse, expectations frequently change over time and not everyone will expect the same things from you.

That’s the challenge companies are facing today: How to set the right Customer Expectations. Why are expectations important? Because:

1. You have to provide a great Customer Experience to maximize customer lifetime value, loyalty and retention.
2. A great Customer Experience is directly dependent on customers’ expectations.
3. Customers will take your company’s promises for granted and you never retain customers by meeting their minimum expectations.
4. To provide the best possible Customer Experience, you have to regularly exceed your customers’ expectations.
5. To exceed customer expectations, you need to set the right expectations for your product or service.
6. must promise less than your full capability, but more than the customers’ minimum expectations.
7. Your promises (and your capabilities) must be at least on par with the competition in order to acquire new customers.
8. It’s easier to know you own capabilities (and the competition’s for that matter) than to know your customers’ expectations.
9. What you do today will not be enough tomorrow. Expectations change over time and according to the situation.
10. You can’t afford to not meet your customers’ expectations
11. If you don’t run some risks, you become stale and predictable, and will eventually fail to meet your customers’ expectations.
12. You can please some people for some of the time, but you can’t please everyone all the time.

So how can you possibly create the right expectations? Here are some guidelines:

• Identify who is (or should be) your customer.
• Get to know your customer and understand their expectations.
• Don’t follow everyone’s expectation! If it’s not your target, it doesn’t matter. It’s just a distraction.
• Don’t play it safe. Maintaining the status quo is the quickest way to become ordinary and one step away from failing to meet ever-changing expectations.
• Define your own Customer Experience metrics and track them.
• Ask for feedback at every opportunity and make it a part of your continuous improvement process.
• Be careful with customer surveys. Most customers will lie to you (even if they don’t mean to).
• Put yourself in your customer’s place. View your product/service from his or her perspective and find what you can do to improve your customers’ experience.
• When you fail to meet an expectation, turn around and surprise your customers with something that will certainly exceed their expectations

In business, as in life, expectations define a good experience. If you exceed expectations often, people will love you. If you repeatedly fail to do so, they will hate you. Above all, if you are simply just meeting expectations consistently, people will be indifferent. When you never stand out, it is just a matter of time before a competitor acquires your customers.

Recently, American Airlines (AA) launched a website just for women travelers. It got dissed pretty quickly because of the initial lavender (non-AA branded) color scheme and lack of meaty content for real women travelers. I agree. There is the start of some good content, but there is still so much more they could include. I’d love to see some actual commentary from women travelers so you feel connected as a community. Research shows that female consumers are more likely to seek advice or information from others before a purchase, so this has huge potential!

But one issue still stands out above all. No one has mentioned that the site is just lacking some good, old-fashioned usability. There are 3 silos of information, but each time you want to navigate through the site, you must hit the back button to return to the microsite’s home page before you can move to another section—or even within that section. How frustrating! The site also resides within the already busy AA.com web interface so you could easily click out of the microsite without even knowing it. If they haven’t lost women with content, they’ll lose them in navigation.

I give American a lot of credit for being one of the first to truly tap this $4 trillion marketplace. Now, just remember to talk with us, not to us.

A recent article on the Financial Times website points out ways travel could be made easier by airlines and hotels, and makes this great point:

"Travel, particularly flying, could be much more pleasant if airlines, airport operators, and the services that support them actually employed people who have an intimate knowledge of how their passengers live, and who put themselves in such a mindset when making service decisions."

The author wonders why international airports don’t always carry international newspapers, and why a clean airplane isn’t always a guarantee. By giving the customer simple goods and services they would use and appreciate, businesses could produce happy customers and increased revenue.

a bunch of buffalo. The Beatles lyric is actually: "there lived a young man named Rocky Racooooooon." On our vacation out west last week, I never hesitated to start singing that song whenever anybody mentioned "Black Hills" or "Dakota," which made me really, really popular with my wife and kids. Oh well, they’re used to rolling their eyes when I’m around.

Our trip started with a jaunt to the Badlands (very cool) followed by Mount Rushmore and the Black Hills. We camped in Custer State Park, which contained miles of rolling beautiful terrain, and enough buffalo (or do you say Bison?) to make your head spin. We were stopped several times in our car to let entire herds wander past.

Then we ventured on to Yellowstone in Wyoming. On the way we passed through Cody (named after Buffalo Bill) and ate at the famous Irma Hotel (founded by Buffalo Bill), drove past the Buffalo Bill Museum, gandered at the Buffalo Bill Dam, and cruised through the Buffalo Bill Cody State Park. That guy was the Trump of the 1890’s.

The kids were not particularly enthused about Old Faithful (which was right on time with its eruption) or the stinky pools of bubbling sulphur water. They enjoyed the hike to the base of a waterfall, and we saw a bear as we were leaving the park, which made the trip for my youngest.

Overall, a goll-dang fine trek.