Jul
9
A Whale of a Frustrating Time
July 9, 2008
When you speak of control measures, the benefits to the customer are often overlooked. In actual fact, people are continuously looking for visual queues – and providing direction can facilitate a positive experience for your customers while avoiding confusion, anger, and even serious incident.
Last summer, my family traveled to the Eastern region of Quebec to go on a whale-watching cruise. To book your spot on the ship, it is recommended that you book through one of their partner sites (physical site), as there is very little parking at the dock. Once you arrive at the pick-up destination – in our case a restaurant – you receive your tickets and then a shuttle bus picks you up and brings you to the dock.
Once we arrived, we saw that there were two companies that shared the dock on the St. Lawrence River. One company had very clear signage, an area fenced-off to form a line and a person was staffed to answer any questions, control the line and provide information. The other company, the one we purchased ticket with, had – a dock.
Once we figured out where we were to go (with the help of the staff member from the other company) we stood near the dock entrance and people kind of wandered up and stood in line so we followed suit. Others followed and soon the line grew kind of haphazardly along a fence. After about 20 minutes in line, the cruise ship approached the dock. Staff disembarked and started taking tickets – and of course a whole group of people budded in line with no interference from the staff.
“Excuse me, there’s a line here,” a young man that was behind us said. “I don’t care,” was the response.
So we finally board and off we go through the St. Lawrence for what was a pretty amazing experience viewing whales. I was actually quite surprised with how many we saw and how close we were to them.
And now back to the dock. We disembark and again – complete confusion. There were no signs as to where you should stand to meet your shuttle bus and nobody was around to offer any information. We stood there with a group of people waiting for the bus. When it arrived – absolute madness ensued. People budding, jumping in front of each other and from where we were lined-up only one family that was actually in line got on the bus.
It actually took three missed buses and witnessing one argument between a ‘line-ee’ and a ‘bud-ee’ to finally get on – and that’s only because we (my family and another family that was waiting with us in the original line) specifically asked the driver to meet us at the far side of the parking lot away from the crowd.
It was a frustrating experience. No direction. No information. A lot of rude people.
We will go on another whale watching cruise, but I’ll tell you, it will be with the other company.
It would have been so simple to avoid all of the resentment, frustration and arguments that we witnessed on the dock. Simple control measures such as signage and a designated area to form a line – for the ship and for the shuttles. Such control measures would have contributed to an overall positive experience rather than the absence tainting what could have been one of the most amazing experiences of someone’s life.
Are there control measures that you could take to improve your customer experience?
Tags: Brand Experience Stuff, Customer Service Stuff, Experience Design Stuff
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