What I learnt after unpacking one of my best “Customer Experience” moments.

I was interviewing a candidate last week for a role in my team, the candidate started the presentation with a question to the panel — What is the best customer experience you’ve encountered in the past few years?

Without hesitation, I answered my experience with Qantas when I travelled to Sydney in 2017.

Over this long weekend, I took some time to reflect on and unpack some of the elements of my experience with Qantas and understand what made it so memorable.

Let’s look at my experience with Qantas:

My Qantas A330 taking off from the Sydney Airport, 2017.

What happened?

1. In the middle of the journey from Singapore to Sydney, I noticed that I could not incline my seat due to some issue, and this was inconvenient for both the passenger behind me and me, especially during mealtime.
2. The stewardess tried to fix it without any luck, and I was promptly given a new seat. I didn’t create any fuss or complain. I had a pleasant journey and landed in Sydney, and forgot about what happened on the flight.
3. What happened next took me completely by surprise — a few days later, I received an email from Qantas apologising for the issue with the seat; they gave me a few thousand airline points and a token of their apology.
4. And it did not end there. A week later, at the check-in counter on my way back to Singapore, I was bumped up to business class as a token of apology. (I didn’t ask for an upgrade).

This was an experience way back in 2017 but was so impactful that I could still remember it very clearly to this day.

When I look back and unpack this experience, few things stood out.

1. The “lowest experience points” in a customer journey provide the greatest opportunity to create the most memorable moments.

I was surprised when I listed my journey with Qantas as one of my best customer experiences. A broken seat in the middle of a long flight is not what you categorise as a “good experience”,

When we assess our customer experience with a brand, we usually remember only the flagship moments, which comprise both highlights and the lowlights.

As a business, you typically want your customer to have an extremely low number of lowlights because the memory of a poor experience lasts much longer than that of a delightful one. “Mostly forgettable” is actually a desirable state in many businesses. It means nothing went wrong. You got what you expected.

But the lowlights sometimes provide us the greatest opportunity to turn around the customer sentiment and make it a truly memorable one.

Customer’s experience across their journey is a combination of highlights and lowlights

2. Context can help you create incredible experiences.

Having a clear understanding of what the customer experienced in the previous touchpoint can help you treat them with empathy and make them feel appreciated and understood.

That’s what Qantas did. Every interaction post my lowlight moment with the seat was engineered to turn around my earlier sentiment.

3. Experience is a company-wide responsibility.

I felt that it was not just the air stewardess, but the other employees in the airline also took responsibility for creating a great experience for me.

Context flowed from one person to another, removing silos and every individual took ownership in turning around my experience.

It felt as if delivering a great customer experience was ingrained in the fabric of every employee I interacted with.

4. Experience is usually relative, and creating memorable ones can be a powerful weapon in differentiating yourself from your competition.

The airline industry is notorious for creating not so stellar customer experiences.

When I rated my experience with Qantas, I was benchmarking this against my experience with other airlines — customers constantly assess their experience with you by comparing you to their experience with another brand in the same space.

Despite your best efforts, your customers are bound to experience few “lowlight” moments in their journey. Your playbook for how you handle these moments can differentiate you from your competition.

In conclusion, we can apply some of these learnings to multiple industries. Having a playbook to turn around the “lowlight” moments can help your business create a differentiated experience and turn around a customer from a potential detractor to a raving fan.

What was your best customer experience moment? Feel free to share in the comments section.