Mapping passenger experience: a lesson from London 2012

Jerry Angrave is a specialist in customer experience – and using customer experience to deliver long-term, more profitable customer relationships. He was kind enough to provide us with some insight (drawing some very topical inspiration from the London 2012 Olympic Games) on how airlines can look to great sporting journeys to better map passenger experience. Read what he had to say here ahead of the upcoming World Low Cost Airlines Congress -

How great sporting journeys teach us to be better at mapping passenger experiences

Like a sports coach getting inside the head of their protégé, diligent mapping of what it’s really like to be a passenger will uncover rich insights that allow us to take the right actions.

It may be that we want better information to remove the root causes of niggles, gripes and complaints, to improve the things that are most important for our passengers and for our bottom line, or to create brand differentiation where it’s most appreciated.

Importantly though, whatever the changes, they must translate into better commercial performance; to fix the unintentional experiences that destroy financial and brand value and, on the flip-side, to strengthen the deliberate experiences that underpin increased core and ancillary revenue.

So with a team of willing cross-functional representatives we prepare to map the first of several tightly-scoped journeys. The aim is to shadow the passenger experience, to find any gaps between what they expect and what they experience in reality, to know what we put customers through and what emotions we evoke as a result. First question then: where do we start – the online booking form? Arrival at the airport car-park?

Good question. When we want to learn about the great sporting journeys, where do we start? At the end, with the winner’s medal, world record or series of championship wins? An analysis of how events unfolded on a particular day? More than likely, to fully understand, it will be well before that, well before the star of our journey made their presence felt.

It’s great that organisations are putting themselves in their customers’ shoes more so than ever before. What’s not so great is that many of those “journeys” turn out to be existing linear process maps, operational flow-charts or decision-trees.

The problem there is that they will only start at the initial physical interaction, whether that’s walking into a travel agent, landing on the booking home-page or arriving at the airport car-park.

That approach is (questionably) better than nothing. But to draw on the sporting analogy then, it would be like a coach trying to understand what drives the individuals in the team, what can be done to make them better, go faster and go further by drawing conclusions purely from an analysis that starts on the race-day itself.

Olympic and World champions take years, if not a lifetime of dedication, family support and sacrifice to be in a position to start the races we watch today. A solo round-the-world sailor will only get to their start line after months and years of intense and meticulous preparation. We can trace a climber’s route to the summit but the physical start of the journey from base-camp is also the end of another long journey of forensic planning.

So, starting a passenger experience journey map at that initial physical contact point risks missing the key triggers, emotions and events that someone has when they feel a want or a need to engage with the brand. And because those emotions and events dictate their behaviour, there are ways that we could shape and influence them in a way that sets up a successful experience both for passengers and our revenue streams.

For example, if I’m flying away on holiday in a month’s time I might start thinking now about how I get to the parking spot I’ve reserved; how do I get from there to the right entrance and from there to the check-in desk? And what can I expect at security and in Departures, how does all that work? I’m getting anxious because it’s the first time I’ve flown. I’ve got my tickets but no other information. I’ll have an autistic relative with me who lives in the moment and is therefore totally reliant on knowing the certainty of what happens next. What if anything goes wrong or the flight is delayed or diverted, who will be my point of contact at the airport, in-flight or at the other end?

There has to be a balance between a ‘one size fits all’ experience and managing 150 or so individual experiences on an A320 but there’s a big opportunity to recognise what’s most important and emotive for passengers as they begin the ‘journey’ from their perspective. Often, it’s a low or no-cost solution. And, a great opportunity to embed brand loyalty and advocacy. But it’s also a missed opportunity for the journey map that just looks at things from our perspective and jumps from the travel agent 200 miles away and 12 months ago to how to pay for baggage, early boarding and in-flight meals.

Every sporting journey, every journey of any sort has a starting point. The beauty and the beast of a map is that we can find a start-point anywhere. That’s the skill of the passenger journey mapping – to find the right starting point and to follow the right path that shows us what to do differently.

Unintentional, unmeasured experiences simply add cost to the bottom line – if you don’t know where you’re going, any route will get you there; deliberate and tracked experiences from the beginning will achieve the right result, realise the ambitions and stay at the top in a more efficient way than our competitors.

If you’d like to get some more great insight from Jerry take a look at his own blog jerryangrave

You could meet with Jerry and a whole host of customer loyalty experts at this years’ World Low Cost Airlines Congress, have a look at the website for more information on how to attend.