I’ve been doing alot of flying lately. Yesterday, I was on a flight from LA to Dallas, and things went pretty well. We took off on time, the service on the flight was friendly - smooth ride, smooth landing, quick taxi to the jetbridge.
And then it all fell apart.
They had already signaled for everyone to stand up and begin de-planing, but the jetbridge was having trouble connecting to the plane door. This is probably the worst time in the entire flight to have a delay - at the end. People are ready to get off the plane and it is extremely frustrating to have to wait, after you’ve arrived at your destination and your loved ones are just outside the door.
There are points during the customer experience where failures are more visible than others. These failures should be avoided at all costs. In the airline industry, visible failures are things such as plane crashes, but also more subtle things like jetbridge failures. Waiting an extra twenty minutes before you get ON the plane is very different than waiting an extra twenty minutes before you get OFF the plane, after you’ve arrived at your destination.
Just think of everything that has to go “right” in order to deliver passengers safely and on-time from one point to another. Its a pretty complex process with lots of ways things can go wrong, resulting in a delay, or even something far worse. But if we focus on preventing these most visible failures, whether we are running a billion-dollar airline, or a little software startup, we’ll deliver a better cutomer experience. For Jambo, we should spend some time thinking about what is the equivalent of our jetbridge.
June 24th, 2005 at 10:46 am
I think our jetbridge is the chat. When you see that there’s someone nearby you want to meet, that chat message had better get through!
Oddly enough, I have positive memories of my last flight delay - this one at the beginning of the experience. Right after we’ve boarded, the pilot announces a mechanical failure in some part that sounds complicated to fix. I groan, never having seen a mechanical failure and all its associated paperwork get fixed in less than 45 minutes, usually much longer. But we were off in about 10 minutes. Almost makes me forgive American Airlines for taking away my extra legroom.
People with very little travel experience have a different reaction to things even when they go well. It’s funny watching greenhorn travelers in the back of the airplane when the door opens at the end of the trip. They jump up, grab their stuff, and wait impatiently and somehow surprised as they watch everyone else to get off first.
We should also consider what the newbies will think about Jambo, compared to the seasoned users.