First Impressions in CX are Almost EVERYTHING!

A recent customer experience (CX) study reminded us that how the customer’s CX journey commences, infects how that customer responds to successive stages of that journey.

A poor start sensitizes the customer to subsequent issues that a customer coming from a positive start, would not register, despite experiencing identical service.

It is not just how it ends

The late and highly acclaimed, Professor Daniel Kahneman talked about the importance of creating a peak end to a customer journey.  The decorated Professor had primarily contemplated the end of the journey and its relationship to the “remembering self.”  Forethought has found that when it comes to CX, an equally substantive point is the commencement of the journey. 

Humans can lay down conscious memories whenever a non-conscious emotion progresses to a feeling - happiness, pride, anger, anxiety – the full gambit of emotions.  This can happen at any time in a CX journey however, how the CX journey commences becomes the filter for all subsequent experiences and therefore, is vitally important for both framing the journey and minimizing the negativity associated with any dissatisfaction.

Timely intervention can halt the cascading effect

At Forethought, the discovery of the importance of the journey commencement occurred when we were helping an aviation client solve the mystery of the relationship between delayed flights and complaints about the entertainment system.

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A delayed flight would sensitize some passengers to a multiplicity of subsequent issues. Issues that otherwise would go unnoticed or not be reported as issues at all.  It brought home for the client the importance of timely problem resolution or at the very least, problem response.

In aviation there is often no resolution for bad weather or a cancelled flight and so a response is all that the airline can offer. Objectively measured, Forethought found that placating a passenger who had experienced an early issue, halted further issues being reported.

One thing leads to another

The importance of the journey commencement and problem response has been reinforced in countless Forethought studies.  Forethought suspects we could go as far as suggesting that the impact of first impressions is a generalizable findings for most, perhaps all, CX studies. For instance, the wait time for new accommodation for personnel transferring bases, effected the subsequent satisfaction with home maintenance.

Another example is the largest casual-dining chain in the United States.  If a restaurant guest experienced an issue and the server failed to respond, the probability that this guest would then report experiencing a second issue was 52%. Furthermore, the probability that this now troubled guest would go onto experience a third issue was 62.6%.

A related question is, given a poor initial encounter, how long in the journey is it before a dissatisfied customer puts the poor start behind them and becomes relatively satisfied with the successive stages of that journey?  For many, without intervention, the answer is never. 

The casual-dining chain set as an objective that no problem should leave the restaurant unresolved. It trained the servers in problem recognition and response. Prior to the intervention, 7.8% of recent guests seriously considered not revisiting the chain. Post the implementation of the training to recognize, respond and resolve issues, the number of guests who seriously considered not revisiting the chain was reduced to 2.6%.

Or, just say you are customer centric!

Please let me share a very recent personal experience. I awoke early Sunday morning in NYC to discover that while I slept, American Airlines had twice moved my Dallas flight to a later flight. Originally 1:40 PM then 5:40 PM and then to 9:09 PM. The second change had me arriving at Dallas several hours after the international connection had departed. When I tried to address the situation online by choosing an earlier flight, I got to the end of the booking process only to be told that the booking had to be completed by calling customer service.

Knowing I needed to leave for Dallas in just a few hours on a busy weekend meant I needed to quickly find an alternative. After being on-hold with the American Airlines “Travel Assistance Desk” for 34 minutes, I gave up and booked a flight with another airline.

I then cancelled the American Airlines flight online to immediately receive an email saying the booking needed to be cancelled at least 2 days before departure, for the refund to be processed. Based on my experience, this is an organization that has little – perhaps no resource allocation for how to recognize, respond and resolve an issue at the journey commencement – even issues it knowingly creates.

It is so much harder to be customer centric than to just say you are.

All in all

The extent to which problems are experienced is moderated by how the journey commences. The solution is of course, don’t create problems in the first place - but if you do, recognize them (will require front line training) and address them as close as possible to their origin. If an organization designs a CX program without this in mind, then it has potentially overlooked the root cause of secondary and subsequent low CX scores.