Popular Mechanics recently published their harrowing account of the cockpit events of Air France 447, which mysteriously disappeared mid Atlantic in June 2009. When the black box was recovered, the real story of the events during a critical 25 minutes emerged that highlighted the real reasons the flight crashed.
Crucially, it can be seen that the co-pilots fail to cooperate, and the most junior pilot erroneously pulls back on the controls during a stall right up to the moment of the crash, something the other pilot is unaware of (the controls should be going forward to allow the aircraft to pick up speed). The aircraft has been designed in such a way that the two controls are completely independent, with no feedback mechanism between them, and at one point the two pilots are even pulling in different directions – one up, and the other down – without ever realizing it until the final seconds before the crash.
None of this information was available until the black box was found in April 2011. Every commercial airliner has a black box, which contain both a Cockpit Voice Recorder and a Flight Data Recorder.
The Cockpit Voice Recorder records all interactions between the pilots. Flight Data Recorders capture data from all sensors during the flight. Putting these two things together against a timeline builds a picture of events that can then be interpreted to tell the ‘story’ of events. This allows airlines to train other pilots to avoid the same mistakes, to simulate the same events, or, possibly, even to change the way the aircraft is designed, all in the hope of avoiding the same mistakes to be made again.
Over 100,000 flights are made every day around the world, and only an average of 150 crash a year (and of those, very few result in significant tragedies). As terrible as a crash is, the vast majority of journeys take place without significant problem, a remarkable achievement.
The Service Experience
Contrast this, if you will, with a typical service experience in a department store, a customer contact centre, or a supermarket. Every individual experience is a new journey that takes off, and lands. Though many of them land successfully, there is often a significant amount of service failure that goes unrecorded and undetected at any level in the organization capable of deciphering and learning from the experience.
Organisations collect data, but do not know what to do with it. The data that is collected can be flawed or biased to “prove” they are hitting certain targets. The data that is used is often focused on giving organisations a picture of scalable implications: e.g. 63% of customers are shopping more than once a week in the same branch of Sainsburys.
Front line staff observe snippets of customer journeys, but are not in a position to connect those snippets to tell a true story.
What if data was used and combined with a qualitative observation? What if we could do the equivalent of recording both the sensory inputs – what people were actually doing – with the qualitative information – what they were saying as they did it? What if we could do that automatically, for every customer journey, so that we could later pick back through the customer journeys that crashed somewhere along the way, and learn from the story to identify improvements so future customers never experience the same issues?
In short, could we build mini black boxes that give us powerful insights into a vast number of customer journeys?
Who is at the controls?
The issue, of course, is that with an airline, 100% of the critical part of the customer journey is focused on what the staff are doing, not the customer. The cockpit provides a unique focal point for capturing this – note that during the Air France 447 recording, we have no idea what was happening with the Captain when he was out of the cockpit, what the passengers were saying or what the cabin staff were communicating to the passengers (if anything).
In contrast, a true customer journey may cover a wide variety of touchpoints and channels, from phone to web to app to in-store/face-to-face. And a significant part of the critical part of the journey is in the hands of the customer. We need to understand not what the staff are saying between each other, but what the customer is saying to the staff.
Little black boxes
It is fortunate, then, that an increasing number of customers possess smartphones. These little pieces of modern technology contain a range of sensors and microphones and could potentially be used to capture a range of data about their users.
Clearly, the big issue here is about privacy, and every company should do their utmost to preserve this privacy. Allowing users to opt in to providing such information, and guaranteeing that it will be anonymised, is a good start. But the key is providing a benefit to the customer for supplying this information.
Consumers will willingly trade information about their habits for benefits. These can be overt, such as loyalty card schemes which have supplied such powerful data to retailers like Tesco over the past decade. Or, they can be more subtle. Applications, for example, that allow customers to scan certain items or geo-locate could feed some of that data back to the organization. Linking it up with other data streams then provides a bigger picture for what is going on in a customer experience.
The potential is there, the question remaining is how affordable it is to capture this kind of data. Yet building it into existing CRM and app development projects may unleash added benefits when you come to research your customers in more depth, creating deeper insights for developing new services and experiences.
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