Finding The Right Tone When The Customer Experience Goes Wrong

Let’s be honest:  there is no such thing as a perpetually perfect customer experience.  At some point, you will make a mistake.

In the aftermath, how will you communicate with your potentially disgruntled customers?  What is the appropriate tone?

A recent JetBlue experience simultaneously turned my attention to this line of questioning and revealed how difficult it can be to answer.

Making The Inevitable Unacceptable

Customer experience mistakes may be inevitable, but that does not necessarily make them excusable.  An element of the JetBlue experience was very much inexcusable.

The airline was not to blame for the core of the issue:  Las Vegas thunderstorms caused travel delays on June 30, the day I – and many others – were scheduled to depart the annual Call Center Week event.

JetBlue does, however, deserve criticism for how it handled the delay.  Whereas other airlines began announcing flight delays in the afternoon, JetBlue repeatedly insisted that its 9:25PM red eye to New York was on schedule.  It never even hinted at the possibility of a postponement.

This refusal to announce a delay persisted until 9:23PM, long after JetBlue clearly knew the flight was not going to leave at 9:25PM.  Yet until that point, the gate claimed the flight was “on time,” the crew had not made any announcement regarding a delay (and, in fact, had begun to tease the beginning of the boarding process), and the mobile app actually declared the flight was in “final boarding.”

JetBlue’s subsequent announcements were similarly murky and frustrating.  Even though I overheard an employee telling a customer that there was no way the plane was boarding before 10:30PM, the app reported the new departure time as 10PM.  It later updated to 11PM, but it was not until well after 11:30PM that the plane actually left the airport.

Delays are inherently troubling, and context made this one worse.  It was a red eye flight – meaning the final departure time was pushing midnight.  It, moreover, was a red eye flight into New York.  Every minute of delay increased the likelihood that we would encounter morning rush hour traffic when leaving the airport.  A delay in excess of two hours effectively guaranteed we would hit traffic, thus further delaying our return home.

As Call Center IQ readers know, this was not my first encounter with JetBlue's poor approach to communication.   Unique to this circumstance, however, was the way a specific employee handled the fallout.

Does Making Light Make It Right?

As the promised 11PM departure drew near – and then ended up in our rear view – a JetBlue employee began to make frequent use of the gate microphone.  A lack of communication may have been JetBlue’s flaw throughout the evening, but it was definitely not a personal attribute of this employee.  If anything, he could not stop talking.

As the employee repeatedly joked about the boarding process (“at one point I’ll call up Mosaic members for priority boarding; if you don’t know what Mosaic is, you’re probably not a member, so don’t stand up”) and lightheartedly chided customers who were hurrying to other gates (“Run, Forrest, Run,” obviously), it became clear that he was, at least partially, motivated by a desire to brighten the mood.  He was dealing with hundreds of tired customers who were stuck at an airport – at 11PM at night -- waiting for the opportunity to spend another 5 or 6 hours sitting on an uncomfortable airplane.  There was no way to make up for the past, but he knew he could make the most of the present.

His strategy had some success.  A substantial percentage of the audience clearly appreciated the employee’s shtick; they were laughing at his jokes and, more importantly, smiling at a time when they had every reason to be pouting.  To the extent that getting knocked down is inevitable, the employee seemed to prove that a brand very much can get back up.

His strategy also seemed to create collateral damage.  A non-trivial minority of passengers seemed bothered by the employee’s approach.  I heard complaints that he was “making it worse.”  I heard a call to “stop talking and board the plane already.”  And when he later got on the plane to make an announcement prior to takeoff, the passenger sitting beside me complained, “Oh no, not more of this guy’s sarcasm.”

There seemed to be two forms of opposition.  First, some seemed outright repelled by his personality.  The reaction was unavoidable given the agent’s exuberance; the lines between extravagant and overbearing and loud and obnoxious are very fine.

Others seemingly found his approach inappropriate for this specific context.  To them, making jokes was tantamount to making light of a situation that needed to be taken seriously.  It suggested that the employee was downplaying his organization’s culpability in a poor customer experience and dismissing the urgency of a solution.

Given the mixed reaction, should we conclude that the agent's antics remedied or exacerbated the problematic experience?

Nothing Is Simple

Since the majority of customers seemed pleased by employee's jokes and demeanor, the intuitive conclusion is that JetBlue handled the matter correctly.  A singular, one-size-fits-all approach is not advisable in all situations, but it is something of a necessity in this type of travel situation (he obviously couldn't deliver different communication to each individual passenger).  The path that pleases the greatest percentage of customers would seemingly be the right one to take.

But the issue is not so simple.  The majority of passengers may have enjoyed the employee's approach, but how did the majority of disgruntled passengers feel?  It is the sentiment of those customers – the ones most bothered by the customer experience failure and thus most likely to take their business elsewhere – that would seemingly be the priority of a rectification effort.

While I did not run a scientific analysis, I definitely noticed overlap between the people most frustrated by the late delay announcement and the people most bothered by the employee's shtick.  If the goal was to turn frowns upside down rather than to turn restrained smiles into enthusiastic ones, the approach was not necessarily a sweeping success.

But is that, in fact, the goal? If JetBlue accepted the particularly disgruntled passengers as "too far gone," there would have been more to gain in pandering to the customers who were either on the fence or still reasonably content.  Besides, who is to say that winning back an angry minority of customers is more valuable than building additional loyalty from the majority?

Truthfully, there is no right answer.  There are some situations in which extravagant comedy is the proper response to a customer experience shortcoming.  There are others in which it is entirely inappropriate.

The fact that there is no universally right answer does not, however, mean there is no universally right approach.  When determining how to respond in the wake of a customer experience issue, following this approach will help you maximize recovery and minimize additional damage.

Know Your Audience: Is an enthusiastic, lighthearted approach ever right for your audience?  Would your particular customer base ever appreciate stern, somber, groveling?  Just like the experience itself, the response to experience mistakes should be tailored to your unique customer base.

Know Your Target: In addition to developing a response based on core customer expectations, ensure you are tailoring your response to the specific segment you aim to satisfy (or pacify).  JetBlue was dealing with two distinct segments – those who were, at most, slightly annoyed and those who were passionately frustrated.  To the extent that each segment would demand a different type of response, the airline needed to choose which represented the greater priority.

Set An Expectation: What constitutes success when responding to a customer experience mistake?  Holding yourself accountable for results – not just behavior – will drive you to think carefully and completely about the tone of your response.

Be True To Your Brand: While the volume knob was definitely turned up, it was clear that this employee would have been jovial, upbeat and loud in all cases.  If that is the “JetBlue experience” – or at least the experience one would get from this agent – when things are going right, it should not be completely abandoned when things are going wrong.

Make Jokes, Don’t Make It A Joke: Laughter is the best medicine.  It is also very infectious; the right joke can make even the most upset, angry individual smile.  In most cases, it is okay to make lighthearted jokes and comments when remedying customer experience issues.  What is not okay is focusing so much on humor that you trivialize the experience – and the mistake.  The customer should feel as if you are making jokes because you care about their happiness rather than because you aren’t taking their issue seriously.

The Solution Comes First: Humor and enthusiasm can supplement a substantive solution, but they cannot replace it.  The effort to brighten the mood should never come at the expense of quickly and completely correcting what went wrong.

Adapt:  If there is ever a need for “agent empowerment,” it is in the context of a customer experience mistake.  Customer emotions are unpredictable, and an agent’s effort to manage those emotions should never be restricted by a script.  The agent must be able to “read the room” and adapt.