An UBER Failure: Another Interaction, 6 More CX Mistakes
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Insofar as their satisfaction supposedly represents a paramount priority, customers are not wrong for demanding perfect experiences from businesses. If they are opting to put their faith, money and trust in a business, they have no reason to curtail their expectations of excellence when doing so.
Justified or not, customers who exercise no discretion when criticizing experiences nonetheless risk scorn and mockery. Theoretical entitlement to perfection is insufficient artillery to combat the reality that neither humans nor human systems can actually be perfect, which means that brand experiences, ultimately, will contain flaws. Individuals who nitpick and obsess over the tiniest of such flaws will not garner sympathy from a public that has come to accept "near-perfect" as its gold standard.
Luckily for the societal cult of complainers, errors in the brand experience are rarely minor. And a business that allows its experience to notably in one regard is almost surely failing in other regards. As a result, businesses are often unable to write customer complaints off as needless nitpicking. There is fire beyond the smoke, and no societal scorn for "whiners" will change that reality.
Recently, Call Center IQ reported on a single online interaction that contained a whopping seven significant customer experience failures. Designed as a means of repairing a customer’s negative sentiment, the hideously flawed interaction served to exacerbate it. It gave the customer considerably less reason to trust the brand and considerably more reason to believe he was not getting the caliber of experience for which he paid.
An illuminating scenario for a customer management community conditioned to appreciate the importance of the customer experience, it was not an isolated one. A recent, isolated encounter with Uber shed light on a similarly extensive list of customer experience shortcomings.
The scenario:
Drawn to Cambridge, Massachusetts for the annual Harvard-Yale game, I was staying at a hotel in nearby Kendall Square. On the morning of the game, I ordered an Uber X car to take me to the Central Square hotel at which my two of my friends were staying. The plan was to then ride to Harvard Square, where we would grab merchandise, food and drinks to take to the game and tailgate.
The mistakes:
No Consistency: Consider this scenario: You’re visiting San Diego on business. Your body requires coffee prior to a big meeting. You search for a Starbucks—identified by its signature logo and green color scheme—and cannot find one. Unbeknownst to you, it turns out that the Starbucks locations in San Diego possess a different logo and a purple-and-orange color scheme.
What about this one? You go into a McDonald’s in Little Rock, only to find out that they do not sell Big Macs and Quarter Pounders and only have sit-down service. The products and experiential elements you have to come associate with McDonald’s do not apply in a particular market.
As the marketplace continues its transformation into a global, omni-channel one, brand consistency becomes more and more important. It is the glue that holds customer relationships together; it is the brand’s surest means of routinely delivering on demands and expectations.
My experience with the Boston-area Uber service failed the consistency test.
Told by the mobile application that my car was waiting, I spent several moments actually looking for my car. The driver had not called or texted to explain where she had parked. There was no black car in sight. And there was no vehicle possessing an Uber sign in the window or the signature yellow license plates they possess in New York.
It turned out that the car was nearby. It was a silver minivan with no recognizable Uber markings. Contrary to the standard practice in New York, the driver believes it is the customer’s responsibility to find her – and thus chooses to never call or text customers upon arrival.
Once inside the car, the experience continued to vary greatly from previous conditions. In New York, Uber users can typically inform drivers of their desired location (75th and 2nd, please; Ludlow and Stanton, sir) the way they would in a typical cab. This driver, however, required that I put the destination into the actual Uber app – and expressed impatience and frustration when I initially failed to comprehend what she was requiring me to do or why she was requiring me to do it.
No Customer Empathy: Aware of the inconsistencies in the experience, the driver nonetheless failed to understand or appreciate their significance. "I get all these New York people telling me how Uber works there – I don’t care. We’re not in New York, we’re in Boston."
The rant would make sense – if she were a driver for a company called "Boston Car Service" and the New Yorkers were basing their preconceptions on a service exclusive to New York. Insofar as Uber is not, however, specific to one city and trades on its brand recognition to attract customers no matter the city they are in, her rant was illogical.
Her failure to consider why customers might expect service consistency reflected on her willingness to construct a wall between herself and her customers. Attempting to do—or at least consider—what customers wanted was not a priority for her; she was operating for herself, and it was the job of customers to live with that reality.
Even if her rant about inevitable disparities between New York and Boston service were logical, it would not be an excuse to ignore customer concerns. It is her job to identify—and make good on—customer expectations. If a customer expects to receive a "New York experience" from a Boston cab driver, she should focus not on dismissing his concern but on figuring out how to best create the desired experience.
Hostility Towards Customers: It is one thing (but still an unacceptable thing) to demonstrate a lack of empathy. It is another thing to actually develop hostility towards customers.
In addition to going on a more general rant about customers’ entitled "expectations" for Uber, the driver also specifically targeted the car’s previous rider, who apparently had the audacity to call her to question where she was (she had not arrived at his location on time). He then had the nerve to tell her that the application has incorrectly reported his location and that he needed her to pick him up from a spot a few blocks away.
Forget thinking the customer was exaggerating his emotions – she was so convinced he was wrong that she ranted about his behavior to another customer. She wanted me, a customer, to empathize with her, a brand representative who was making it clear she did not believe the customer was always right.
As if.
No Respect for Customer Effort: While it is clear that I encountered a particularly poor driver, poor employees are borne from poor organizational practices. In this case, the policies she was choosing to enforce ran counter to the notion that businesses must work to reduce customer effort.
Per the policy she was citing, it was the customer’s job to call if he could not find the car. It was the customer’s job to assure the car drove to the proper location. It was the customer’s job to input the destination.
Instead of thinking about ways to shoulder some of the burden—and build goodwill in the process—the agent was only willing to fulfill the most fundamental tasks associated with her gig. If the situation required more effort, that effort was going to come from the customer.
No Situational Knowledge: In an era of first call resolution, we expect contact center agents to be able to know—or instantly access—precise details about the thousands of customers they serve and thousands of issues those customers introduce. No matter the agent’s native region or personal area of expertise, he is expected to have the knowledge needed to adapt to any situation.
Why, then, would the same expectation not be true of Uber drivers? In this case, my driver did not know, off-hand, that the hotel at which my friends was staying was only about two miles from where she picked me up – and off a major highway. Despite driving an Uber in Cambridge, she had no familiarity with Harvard. She did not know where the Square was and, somehow, did not know football’s oldest rivalry game was taking place that day.
For Uber to replicate the cab experience (and truly produce great customer experiences), its drivers must know major street names, landmarks and neighborhoods. They also must know whether daily events or other issues will produce traffic headaches along their regular routes.
No Proactive Logic: Aware that I was picking up friends before heading to Harvard Square, the driver, obviously, knew I was going to require another vehicle. While I understand (and accept) that the Uber app would have required me to book another ride, she would have already been at the hotel—and thus in position to immediately accept my ride request and drive to the next destination.
Thinking like a robot rather than like a human, the driver somehow did not anticipate that need. She made no offer to wait for me to gather my friends and advance to the next destination. She, in fact, expressed no consciousness of that reality even though I had informed her of my ultimate travel plan early in the ride.
Moreover, after I grabbed my friends from their hotel lobby and raced out to the front—where she was still parked—she somehow did not notice. My knocks on the car window went unanswered as she drove away, forcing us to order another ride (from an employee who, while a more pleasant person, was guilty of many of the same experiential shortcomings).
