The Bad Customer Experience Report: Delta Airlines
The bad Customer Experience (CX) I would like to share is about one of the major American Airline: Delta Air lines.
It occurred a long time ago when I was really young maybe 4 or 5 years old. I was travelling with my parents from France to Mexico where we were going to spend our summer vacations. In order to land in Mexico we had to stop in Atlanta and change plane. It was one of the first time that we traveled by plane and the stress rose very fast when we arrived in America. The atmosphere was very different from France in the airport of Atlanta. We were running late for some reasons I cannot remember so we had to run in the airport with our luggage trying to avoid the people that were running everywhere as well. The airline we chose in order to land in Mexico was Delta Air lines, a well reputed American airline. The stress finally went down when we arrived at the gate just on time. We knew before that the fight will not be that long (about 4 hours) so we guessed that the airline will not deliver food in the place and because we were very hungry for the reason that we did not have time to eat after our previous flight, we decided to buy some food very fast that we will eat in the plane. Finally in the plane, we arrived to our seats and waited for the plane to take off.
The main problem that I would like to talk about is actually one of the flight attendant that made our fight terrible and unforgettable. She was a lady in her 40s with an arrogant face, meaning that she was not smiling at all. She was the one that we saw the most often and most probably the one we wouldn’t have wanted. As the place took off, we grabbed our food and started to eat, however we saw that lady coming to us with the weirdest face. She started speaking very loud telling us that we didn’t need to buy food before because the free food was provided by the airline. Saying that to us is not a problem but the problem is that she was being very loud and she was humiliating us in front of all the other passengers basically meaning that we are dumb to have bought food before the fight. She was laughing at us and my parents just didn’t know what to say because everybody was looking at us and my parents were really not used of taking planes. A flight attendant is supposed to be quiet and talk close to the passenger if she/he has something to say. It should be forbidden for flight attendants to act this way and shame passengers. Shorty after, I remember that I wanted to look through the window in order to see the view and the clouds. However, she came again with the exact same attitude, still shouting saying that I shouldn’t open the window shutter (we were flying at night time) because it was night and other passengers were sleeping. My parents were very angry that she couldn’t say it in a calm way to a child. They didn’t want to start a scene because it was pretty useless, they would just let a review after the flight. For the whole flight, she still had her grumpy face and her arrogant way of talking to people which was intolerable. We went out of the plane feeling very down. Even if the customers are doing something wrong, the role of the flight attendant is to tell them what to do in a polite and quiet way in order to not humiliate those people and not disturb the other passengers. Not everybody knows about what to do in a plane, most particularly when we are not used to it.
The (bad) Customer Experience (CX) here is the interaction with that flight attendant that made up everything and ruined the actual aspect of the airline service. This experience might be different from customers to customers with that airline since they are many flight attendants and maybe that lady had a bad day and would not react like that another day. We relate here to the User Experience (UX) because in addition to interacting with product/service like for User Interface (UI), we also experienced the interaction with different aspects of the company (in this case, the flight attendant). It was not just about the service itself (the fact of travelling by plane from a place to a destination), it was also about the interactions in the service itself that we had to experience.
As suggestions I could give to a flight attendant (from any airline), offering a service HAS to be done in an amiable and kind way in order to put the customers in a comfortable situation. In my case, she did the opposite and put us in a very awkward situation. If I was the management of the brand I would make sure that all my employees treat the passengers with respect and respond as much as possible to all their needs.
