The Amtrak Acela Customer Experience. Hair on my Seat.

As we go about our days we connect single interactions to whole experiences – without thinking much.
Sometimes we realize where things are disconnected, where brand promises are not delivered consistently across all touch points.

As soon as we enter our office something amazing happens:

All of a sudden, inside, we manage to focus on just our area of expertise that lies in our specific responsibility. For example, I focus on improving that billing layout, maybe work in some new graphics (obsessed with icons). A colleague is pushing to simplify our website, another colleague looks into giving our product packages a brush up, another one is optimizing resources allocated to our customer care, by defining narrower opening hours, etc. Quite possible, we never talk or coordinate among each other…

That is all very service focused. But, if we want to stage experiences, we need to understand what the whole experience is – across all touch points! In fact, what is a customer experience? Let’s take a look.

Been on a train lately?

Ask yourself: Where does your experience start? What are the main elements, in chronological order? Where does your train riding experience end?
I am pretty sure if you asked a “product manager” at a train company, he would say that their service is to transport passengers from A to B. Primarily focused on punctuality, capacity, maybe comfort of the ride, then costs, etc. right?

Here’s an example we had great fun and success with in our trainings to get started. I can’t really backtrace to the source of it. Sorry, no harm meant. Great example!

At Amtrak Acela (US east coast) they understood what the whole customer experience is about (see illustration).

Illustration by Lars Diener-Kimmich, (then) Swisscom

I love the revelation, that we usually don’t travel to stay at the arrival station, right?! I travel by train to travel at least a bit farther – that then completes my experience.

Now, try for yourself: “An evening at the movies”. Go through the steps – without reading further. Go ahead. (Take yourself a minute or two.)

OK. Ready for some check questions?

Kids at home? Babysitter? Right!

Did you park your car, or did you arrive by public transport? Stuck in traffic, got you stressed?.

Did you go for a drink before?

What did the lobby smell like? Popcorn butter?

Toilets? Rip-off prices for ice cream and the sweets?

Was the girl at the counter nice to you?

Did you pre-order tickets online? (Ah! So, when did your experience start?)

And then, did you have to stand in that same, long queue to pick up your tickets, with everyone else just buying the ticket?

After the movie, did they let you out the back – next to the trash cans?

Did you go for (another) drink with your friends?

Forgot about that babysitter, maybe? Paid in cash?

Did you share your opinion on the movie online, on Facebook? Maybe write a little review somewhere?

OK, why exactly did you initially go see that movie? So, where did your experience start really? In the train home a couple of days ago, peeking over your (unknown) co-passenger looking at the movie ads in the newspaper?

How were the seats? Did you sit behind the tallest guy in the theater?

Music, sound: too loud, too low?

Isn’t it amazing how quickly we’ve got the whole experienced covered from start to end, how easy we can visualize and share what we have experienced? Our customers do that too!

Also, think about who and what is all contributing to your movie-night-experience. It’s very likely not staged by one single provider. (Unless they have a childcare on-site, and you spontaneously decided to go to the movies when you walked past it.) That’s when we start realizing how tricky it might be to orchestrate all these interactions into one consistent experience. That is what we aspire!

After training hundreds of participants in the basics of Customer Experience Design – usually starting with the Amtrak Acela case -, my colleague Nick and I came up with the idea of creating short video clips of the essential training content. To be used company-wide as refreshers.

We’re both Top Gear lovers, need to stop when Rowan Atkinson comes on, prefer a laugh over a grim face, have watched cartoons and probably have read too many comic books. To our utmost surprise, the colleague from brand (with a video-making-past) thought our initial ideas had room for improvement. We wanted to pitch with a flipchart on wheels in a moving city bus, record our clip on watering holes in the zoo standing among flamingoes in ankle-deep water, do a feedback round in a 3rd grade class, all with snorkels and huge goggles on our faces …

We had to learn to focus on the main message, less on gadgets. We wrote little scripts, two interns filmed us in two days and then cut 10 short clips (timeboxed to 20 hours per clip) – under the firm management of our apprentice Tina, who had also organized basic lighting and some props (We did sneak that goggle in.). Unfortunately for the non-Swiss among you the videos are spoken in Swiss German. It felt more authentic to do this in our mother tongue; but at least subtitled in French. If anyone of you has a way to have these subtitles automatically translated into English … Awesome!

Here’s the clip on “customer experience”, or “the customer journey” introducing also the “customer experience chain” (german: Kundenerlebniskette) that we use across Swisscom as a basic pattern to discuss, design, stage and assess customer experiences.

Also, you can find the reference with the hair on my seat.

How do you do talk about customer experiences in your company?

What has worked well for you, to get you and your colleagues started?