Service is an Art...but Don't Forget the 'Science' - By Zach Conen

Sounds counterintuitive, no? How can a zero-defect robot provide true hospitality? In short, by ensuring the compliance with standards and procedure becomes automatic and unthinking, allowing the real time, effort and attention to be focused on the person standing in front of you or on the phone. The guest. Customer. Fan. Patient.

While service and "experience" are obviously somewhat of an obsession around here, I recently had a travel experience (I know, I know, another tale of travel woe) that reminded me of the utmost importance of plain execution and attention to detail.

While pulling into the airport parking lot for a recent flight, I received a message on my cell phone indicating that my flight - due to take off in a little more than an hour - had been cancelled. Annoying, but not unprecedented. I called the 800-number provided to reschedule and also queued up in line at the ticket counter. Both service outlets converged nicely; the gentlemen on the phone did his best and managed to secure me a flight out the first thing the next morning. I would have reached my destination in time for my meetings, but it would have made for a loooooong day. I decided to continue on to the counter, where the representative there managed to find me a connecting flight arrangement that would get me to Chicago only two hours later than originally scheduled. Beautiful. Both service people were friendly, empathetic and attentive. And I concluded each service interaction but pleading with them to confirm that I WAS STILL BOOKED ON MY RETURN FLIGHT HOME and that I hadn't been mistakenly cancelled from that leg of the journey. (Yes, the inquiry was based on experience.) I was informed unequivocally that I was still good to go!

So....to make a long story short (probably too late for that), I get to Chicago, do my business and proceed to check in online for my return flight...and am told that there is no record of my confirmation number. A quick call to LRA's travel coordinater, Yolanda, revealed that the airline in question did not have me confirmed for that flight...and that the airline could possibly get me home the next stay. While the blood pounded in my head and I did my best not to scream expletives in the hotel lobby, she said she'd investigate.

For the next hour, my head filled with all sorts of social media revenge fantasies and the eloquent letters of pain and suffering I would write to the powers that be at the airline. Complete strangers avoided me in the lobby as the dark clouds circled above, right until I got another phone call from Yolanda with a happy resolution. Oooops - there bad. I was actually confirmed on the flight, they had just somehow erased my confirmation number during the flurry of activity the day before, so there had been no way to connect the Zach Conen in the hotel lobby with the one scheduled to fly home that evening. No harm, no foul, right?

Uh, not quite. Damage done, as my personal "customer experience" account with that particular airline took another entry on the debit side of the ledger. Two positive service interactions, two representatives looking to help me out...and the net experience was negative because one of them couldn't execute on the basics, despite my pleading reminders to do so.

Sometimes it's not all about "wow" or going "above or beyond" or providing "world class" anything - it's about dotting the i's and crossing the t's. Any measurement program - whether it be a quality assurance program, mystery shopping or customer survey research - needs to account for the "art" of hospitality as well as the "science" of execution.

Logos, product and company names mentioned are the property of their respective owners.

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