What Airline Boarding Innovation Overlooks: Human Behavior
Colin Shaw
LinkedIn 'Top Voice' & influencer Customer Experience & Marketing | Financial Times Award Leading Consultancy 4 Straight Years | Host of 'The Intuitive Customer' in Top 2% | Best-selling Author x 7 | Conference Speaker
I see there are discussions again about the airline boarding process, as American Airlines is letting people without carry-on bags board first so as not to clog the aisles.
American’s announcement of their "new" boarding process sounds reasonable and worth trying until you discover the "new" boarding procedure is only new to American. Virgin America tried it and rejected it. Oh well, back to the drawing board.
As I read different articles on the way airlines have approached this it made me smile. All the articles are about the boarding procedure or process. No mention is made of the Customer Experience. In my blog: Process v Experience: A massive difference, I outlined that there is a massive difference between a process and an experience. A process is an internal view of life and is about efficiency. An experience is about what the customer feels. As with most companies, airlines are fixated on the process and efficiency. This reveals their mentality and the way they look at the world. They are inside-out by nature. I am a frequent traveler so I know that getting to the destination on time is an important part of the customer experience, and the boarding process is part of that, but let’s be clear: It is only part of the topic of getting there on time and this can be achieved in many ways.
Organizations that focus on the process frequently miss the most important factor,
customers are people and people are irrational. To highlight the point, one airline we dealt with internally called their customers "self-loading freight,"’ which speaks volumes! They treated customers as transactions to be processed. But what I see when I fly is very different. I see a microcosm of human behavior every time I get on a flight, and I find it fascinating. To me the answer lies in looking at customer’s behavior.
For example, you may well recognize the following scenario. You have a tight connection on your flight. The first flight is already late for some reason. There is total confusion at the gate. Human behavior makes many people get up out of their seats and stand near the gate, blocking it at the same time. We all know this is not logical, but we are dealing with people and they are irrational. People feel the need just to get on the plane, as if it will leave without them they don’t. As you look around you’ll see some woman with a dog in a bag who is telling her dog that "it won’t be long now" and she grips her boarding card as if for dear life. As the boarding starts, everyone takes that half a step closer, even though they know they are not being called. You eventually get on and sit next to some guy who has decided to have a three course dinner on the flight. Then you hear the announcement. "Your flight has been delayed because of the late arrival of the inbound aircraft." I always think, "yes, I know it’s late by why is it late?"
Now the flight attendant, with a tinge of frustration in her voice, says “we would ask you to hurry and take your seats so we can make up time”, as if it’s our fault the plane is late. Everyone is very tense and this is not a great customer experience.
In a perverse kind of way I enjoy it, as I love people watching. I sit there and watch humanity pass me by. At the gate I see some people cutting the line thinking people won’t see them, but I do and I am sure others do. No one says anything. Then the person who tries to get through the gate early, thinking they won’t be noticed, and then the teenager listening to music oblivious to the world around them. Contrast that again with the ‘road warrior’ business people who have everything down to a tee.
So my advice to the airlines is simple: look at your customers' behavior and design a boarding process around that; don’t treat people as a production line. That approach will break down every time, because people are irrational.
One of the most sensible things I have seen at airports recently has been the way some segregate the TSA lines to expert and casual travelers. Road warriors zip through the lines, as we know what to do. We have already taken our shoes, belt, laptops and liquids out and placed them in the right place. The casual traveller needs to be coached/informed/told what to do by "friendly" TSA agents – although being friendly could be an interesting challenge for the TSA.
Airlines hold a wealth of data on their passengers and should build more. Maybe, after first class, they should allow road warriors to board, even if they are road warriors with other airlines (I acknowledge my bias here). Other ideas would be, if a person hasn’t travelled for a while the airlines should offer a video explaining how to board a plane efficiently with some incentive attached to watching it. So I believe the answer, when re-designing the boarding process, lies in customer behavior rather than looking at the world through "production line" eyes.
Failing all this, I would suggest that we recognise that it’s just not going to get any better and leave it alone -- or maybe issue cattle prods to the airline stewards. That should solve the problem!
If you liked this article, you might like the following blogs & webinar:
- Process v Experience – A massive difference!
- 7 Secrets to Improve your Customer Experience
- Customers are Irrational Stop Fighting - Embrace Irrationality!
Colin Shaw is the founder and CEO of Beyond Philosophy, one of the world's first organizations devoted to customer experience. Colin is an international author of four best-selling books and an engaging key-note speaker. To read more from Colin on LinkedIn, connect with him by clicking the follow button above or below.
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The biggest joke in boarding is that zones are meaningless when 40% of passengers board in the first two zones. Just look at general boarding of the initial group consists of elites, elites for codeshares, affinity credit card holders, those who purchased premium seats, those "legitimately" seated in the rows for which the zones were created in the first place, and don't forget those in other zones who happen to be sitting with someone in the first zone. It's a mess. To address the subject of the article, boarding back-to-front is the most straightforward. It "makes sense" to everyone without having to explain anything. The average traveler and the road warrior get it.
Colin, put simply, many people who design processes think logically - and when you are designing a process it "looks better, and cleaner", as a logical process. Next you expect all people to exhibit common sense. People, to the contrary of something "common", often seem to have different levels and expectations on what constitutes common-sense and, when confronted with a logical process, often discover their commonsense does not conform to a logical process. A logical process also tends to remove the "gaps" which experienced, knowledgeable staff can use to align customer expectation with business service requirements. End result is customers showing signs of frustration, anxiety, and even anger towards the business and also to the staff (and if you asked the customers in a quieter moment, they would state they know it isn't the staff's fault - but who else is there to tell.....maybe whenever a new "process" is released the designers should be directed (forced) to trial the process for six weeks under real conditions).