Despite being a frequent traveler, one source of anxiety that I can never shake is the fear of having left something behind when I am headed to the airport. And yes, over the years, there have been some items I have forgotten, but it’s usually nothing important. Last week, however, I had the new experience of an item I failed to leave behind, which created an enormous amount of stress.
Last week’s travel was a trip within a trip. I traveled from SF to Atlanta (a place we used to live and travel to often) with my wife and two kids, and in the middle of the week, I flew to Nashville to attend the Forrester CX conference. I grabbed an Uber early Tuesday morning and all was good until I got to the security line. As I was emptying my pockets prior to going through security, I realized I was pulling out one item that I absolutely did not need to have on me – the keys to the car we had rented for the week in Atlanta. In my hurry to get out the door, I must have subconsciously grabbed the rental car keys.
Panic immediately set in as I processed the consequences of this action. I wasn’t coming back to Atlanta for two more days, and my wife needed the car to get around town and for a two-hour drive to my mother-in-law’s house. It was a rental car, so we clearly did not have a spare key. My wife was also managing our two kids, including a toddler whose car seat was in the rental car. I had to figure out a way to get her a key.
After I cleared security, I called the rental car company to see what options I had and felt a bit of hope as there was an option on the IVR for “lost key or locked keys inside”. The person who answered first asked me if I was in a safe environment. I told them I was at the airport and explained my situation. My hope was soon dashed as I realized there was nothing they could do to help. I could pay $75 to have them remotely open the car, but they could not provide a spare key to start it.
They told me they could have the car towed, but the only way for my wife to get another car would be for her to trek to the airport, which was not ideal given the kid’s situation. I would have paid whatever it took to deliver a spare key or another rental to my wife, but this company told me they could not do that.
As it became clear that the rental car company would be of no help, I needed to get off the phone quickly and try something else. But before I could get off the phone, the agent asked me to confirm one more time that I was in a safe place. So you can’t help me, but I need to ask again if I am in a safe place. I wanted to respond and say that I wouldn’t be in a safe place when I got home in two days if I couldn’t fix this situation.
I then started asking around the airport to see if there was a UPS or FedEx on-site that I could use for same-day delivery. Of course, there wasn’t. I was racking my brain, thinking of other options, some crazier than others. Could I pay someone who was arriving in ATL to deliver the keys for me? Maybe I would run into someone I knew?
Then it hit me: maybe I could call an Uber and have the keys delivered back home. But that would require me to go back through security again, and I was running short on time. My flight was leaving in 40 minutes but hadn’t started boarding yet. I explained my predicament to the gate agent, who was very sympathetic. She encouraged me to try it, took my seat number, and told me she would let me board as late as possible.
From my first pass-through, I knew security lines weren’t bad that morning. I had TSA and Clear, and luckily, my gate was literally right outside of security. So I called an Uber and returned to the ride-share pickup area. It was a bit of an ordeal, running with luggage in 80-degree weather in conference attire, and at one point, I definitely annoyed a traffic patrol guard by ignoring his hand while I darted across the street during what seemed to me to be a reasonable gap in traffic. But I made it to the pick-up spot just as the Uber was arriving.
I frantically explained the situation to the driver (who was also very sympathetic), handed her the keys, then headed back into the airport. While security lines were still short, of course, this was the time I got hit with a random security check, which added a little more suspense. Ultimately, I made it back to the gate on time. On board the flight, I followed the Uber driver’s path and was able to confirm delivery of the keys just before I had to shut my phone off.
So, what a way to kick off what turned out to be a fantastic three days at the Forrester CX conference. While I met some great people and learned a lot over the three days, my pre-conference ordeal also taught me some important CX lessons.
I won’t mention the rental car company’s name, but they are a company I have used in the past, although I am not particularly loyal to them. And they didn’t really do anything wrong here, but after this experience, I am unlikely to ever book with them again. Because they failed me in my moment of truth. They didn’t come through when I needed them to step up and help me in a desperate situation. They had an opportunity to differentiate themselves. They could have done something to help me fix this situation; they would have been heroes to me, and I would have been a customer for life. I might have called out their name here and to others as an example of a company with exceptional customer support. If only.
What is unfortunate is that this company has no idea they lost a customer, or why. I still had the rental car for another four days after that incident occurred. So they still had a chance to save me. If they had mechanisms in place to understand the experience across various customer journeys, they could have picked up on my frustration with their inability to help when I needed them the most. Even if they were unable to help me at that moment, that knowledge could have helped trigger recovery actions over the next four days to potentially make it up to me and keep me as a customer in the future.
They could have used my experience to prevent others from having similar bad experiences in the future. Maybe my dumb mistake was a unique situation, but are there other situations where the solution of “we will tow your car, but you need to come to the airport to get a replacement” is also not helpful? How many other customers are frustrated with this solution? Is there an opportunity for them to delight future customers by going above and beyond when things go wrong?
My experience illustrates the importance of having a robust journey management system that captures customer sentiment across key moments of truth and is then linked to closed-loop processes. Do you have visibility into the key moments of your customer experience that are either creating customers for life or causing customer churn? And do you have processes in place to ensure you can quickly address unexpected bad experiences when they happen? If not, you could be putting your customers through experiences similar to the one I dealt with last week. And while it ended well for me and is somewhat entertaining in hindsight, lost customers are never amusing.
If you are interested in learning more about how QuestionPro’s Journey Management solution can help your company better address poor customer experiences that you may not even be aware of, you are welcome to contact us. We’ll be delighted to hear from you.
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