This is not secret - I have a sweet tooth and half-baked cakes rate high on the list of things I like. But not when they are served digitally by airlines and hotels, to name a few. This happened to me twice this week and it is one of my pet peeves.
Hotels and airlines benefit of the internet and digitalisation and the customer experience is totally different from what it was 20 years ago. Everything can be done online from booking to check-in and some hotels even offer digital room keys, directly to your smartphone. Changes and cancellations can all be done online and for airlines, boarding passes and capture of passenger information are all digital too and this is great.
And because digitalisation is done well, expectations rise and this is where half-baked cakes can be served, unfortunately. I had this twice this week, with an airline and with a hotel. I don't call names here, it is not the point, and this phenomenon exists with a lot of companies. What is a half-baked airline cake? Imagine the following scenario. You buy a ticket online, you check-in in the app and a few hours later, you get an email from the airline. Is there something wrong? Change of aircraft? Flight cancellation? Delay? No... it is just an email to remind you about your flight and asking if you checked in. Really?
Now that hotels offer check-in online and keys on smartphone, the same started to happen. I love such services an there is nothing like arriving at a hotel after a long travel and be able to go directly to one's room without any queueing and lengthy check-in process. Same thing here: check-in online is long done and they I got an email to remind me that I can check-in online.
I understand that many different technical systems are involved. Ticketing, sales, marketing, back-end, front-end, web and email interfaces and so on... Creating an email reminder is a cool idea but don't send it if the customer has taken the action. If a system is smart and connected enough to create and schedule an email series, shouldn't it also be smart enough to cancel sending this if the action has been taken already? And please don't tell me it is a matter of personal data protection. If it is possible to send me an email to confirm my booking, it certainly is possible as well to check if I've checked-in before sending me a reminder.
This likely goes into the 80 / 20 rule or Pareto principle - check Wikipedia for the explanation. With 20 percent of the work, 80 percent of the goal is achieved. Many airlines and hotels are there now and it will be time to invest more effort to polish such details. Additional improvements will be more and more costly and will take more time and it is not clear where to draw a line. Will a booking and checking system ever be considered "finished"? There will always be room for improvement and the funding will be secured as part of the price of the sold product, be it a hotel room or a flight.
Digital services are great and I really appreciate it, as it makes travel so easier and smoother and I'm sure my favourite airlines and hotels will keep working on this and that I will get less and less half-baked cakes.
End of rant - start of action.
Is your company serving half-baked cakes? Think of your digital processes and ask yourself. What can you improve? Are you sending emails that should be conditioned to some actions being taken or not? What would it take to change it? What is the smallest step you could take? Because of the nature of the 80 / 20 rule, you will likely never reach perfection and some improvement could be costly, yes. But is there not a way to improve, even slightly, with a simpler step?
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