Customer experience crisis: Proactively mitigating the risk of broken promises

Alex Allwood

  • Principal, All Work Together
  • Website
Alex's focus is connecting customer and culture to empower customer-centric growth. Working with B2B2C, Alex helps improve experiences that enhance customer value and distinctively differentiate. With a 20 year track record in leadership, operations and marketing, Alex’s strength is developing customer experience strategy: customer understanding and empathy, experience vision and guiding principles and the customer narrative to enable collaboration and alignment. Alex is principal of the customer experience consultancy, All Work Together; has authored the book Customer Experience is the Brand, regularly facilitates Customer Journey Mapping workshops and is a speaker on customer-centric transformation.

Last Friday, three weeks after United Airline’s spectacular customer experience disaster, customers received a letter from the company’s CEO, Oscar Munoz.

He began by acknowledging the brand’s broken promise to customers:

‘Each flight you take with us represents an important promise we make to you, our customer,’ the letter read. ‘It's not simply that we make sure you reach your destination safely and on time, but also that you will be treated with the highest level of service and the deepest sense of dignity and respect.’

In the eyes of a customer, a brand stands for a promise of value. Promises that are kept deliver a positive and rewarding experience that foster customer loyalty and positive recommendation.

Today, when a brand breaks their promise spectacularly, the impact is not limited to one or two customers defecting to a competitor. The reality is our daily news is now controlled by anyone with a mobile phone and social sharing. Unhappy customers now vent their outrage instantaneously and without censorship, effectively annihilating brand trust within minutes.

In the United Airlines case, the incident was viewed online more than 200 million times.

United failed to uphold its brand premise on multiple fronts: From the basic promise of delivering the service paid for, to providing customer safety, to treating passengers respectfully and delivering on the aspirational promise found in its strapline, ‘Fly the friendly skies’ .

In his ‘moving forward’ letter, Munoz outlined his intention to lead the organisation in building a customer-centric culture; a culture that empowers employees to do what is right by the customer and that’s dedicated to redoubling efforts to put customers at the centre of everything it does.

The staff element

A central tenet to rebuilding the brand will be the restoration of employee confidence and pride. Critically, to rebuild trust with its customers, United will need to re-engage its people.

I expect many of the 87,000 employees will have suffered significant embarrassment during the crisis. These feelings will continue, as long as the stigma of community outrage remains.

Leaders across the business will need to unite employees behind the higher purpose of doing what’s best for customers. And the leadership group must commit to serving as role models for the rest of the business to follow.

Ultimately, customer centricity starts at the top of the business and shapes the beliefs and values developed as company-wide disciplines.

In these early days, the leadership team’s focus will be on defusing rumours by communicating with transparency and discussing with internal stakeholders in an open and honest way the company’s initiatives to rebuild the brand.

A key way of achieving this is to foster a workplace of openness that helps rebuild employee engagement. Success will depend on open and consistent communication reinforced at every opportunity through team meetings, company-wide emails, an open-door policy and employee feedback on customer improvements.

Effectively shifting the business from product-centric to customer-centred also requires every employee to buy-in. Involving staff in visualising the future state and collaborating on a new customer experience vision will provide a sense of responsibility for shaping their future.

United has begun the process by empowering its customer service teams to provide on-the-spot goodwill gestures in the form of miles, travel credit and other amenities when a experience misses the mark.

Had the business fostered a culture of trust and safety for employees to advocate on behalf of customers earlier, employees would have been empowered to de-escalate the recent incident.

In his communication, Munoz admitted this was a problem at United:

‘It happened because our corporate policies were placed ahead of our shared values. Procedures got in the way of our employees doing what they know is right’.

If United is to fix the systemic problems in the business, the airline will need to go much further, however. This will require an organisational redesign of service delivery across the company’s policies and processes informing how employees respond to customers.

The first step should be an in-depth exploration of service delivery from surface-to-core to understand the business’s service ecosystem; from the experiences customers have, to how these are delivered.

This process unravels the complexity of how people in the business make decisions, allocate responsibility, manage and make sense of information and work together to get the job done. It also helps to shed light on how organisational policy gets in the way of employees doing what’s right for their customers.

What this teaches all of us, is that regardless of company size or type, businesses today need to proactively mitigate the risk of failing to uphold their brand promise by fostering a customer culture where people, processes and services support doing what’s best for customers.

Tags: customer experience management, brand strategy, custoemr engagement

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