I’ve been getting irrational about flying lately.

I’ve customarily flown one of the bigger old-school airlines like American and United. More recently, I’ve found myself on Southwest, JetBlue, and even RyanAir in Europe.

When I’m traveling by myself, I really don’t care which airline I take. I travel light and can sit anywhere. But when I have family along (especially my kids) flying on Southwest or RyanAir causes me inexplicable pre-flight anxiety. The reason? We don’t have seat assignments.

As we line up with our boarding passes and see the hundred-plus other passengers milling about with their big “carry-on” bags, I start wondering: will we be able to sit together? How am I going to find space in the overhead compartment?

It’s really pretty stupid. I know we’ll get seats, and we’ll probably be close to each other. Still, why is it better that –when I’m boarding a cramped American 727 and I’m in a hole they call 27E, I feel more comfortable?

I’ve been reading more on Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, and I think the fear is based down in one of the first few levels of the needs pyramid – particularly the level 2 need for safety or security (translate as “peace of mind”).

It’s irrational, but it’s real.

Let me know if you have other ideas on our irrational (but real) anxieties.

Last week I attended, with a couple of my Vox compatriots, the GEL (Good Experience Live) Conference in New York. GEL brings together a diverse group of speakers and attendees, all focused on different aspects of customer experience.

If GEL is anything, it is creative and fresh, especially compared to the countless other corporate and trade conferences I’ve attended over the years. The participants included chief experience officers, some customer experience and user experience consultants and techies, and even a gaggle of Google-ites. The first day found me running around the Metropolitan Museum of Art on a scavenger hunt in the morning and wandering Greenwich Village in the afternoon.

Speakers the next day – an alarming number of whom were educated at either Harvard, MIT, or Stanford – presented an impressive array of ideas and stories across industries and disciplines, from the traditional to the…well this…and these guys.

Overall, it’s a trip. Sign up here if you’re interested.

I’m looking forward to heading out tomorrow for the GEL Conference (Good Experience Live) in New York, an eclectic gathering of movers and shakers interested in all things related to creativity and customer experience. The events should be great, and who knows, maybe my hotel will be great too. I’ve heard that’s possible.

On my last business trip, I was confronted with one of those “what do I do now?” moments while trying to depart the downtown Hyatt in Atlanta. My usual mode of egress from hotels is to leave the keys in the room and walk out the front, figuring they won’t forget to update and send me a final bill.

On this morning, however, I decided to give the shiny new “Self Express Check-In and Check-Out” kiosk a try. After all, there’s no waiting, a cool touch screen, and the word “express” in the title. What an incredibly logical approach to customer service! Besides, our company, Vox, has been getting more involved with new technology that improves customer experience, so it’s field research.

As I started punching my name and other basic info in, I noticed that the screen was not necessarily configured properly. One had to lean down hard and maintain pressure for a letter to register, but hold down a micro-second too long and two letters popped up, requiring a painful delete procedure. Also the alignment was off, requiring a distinct prejudice of the user’s finger slightly to the northwest of the actual letter.

Slowly, I struggled through the process. I wanted to abandon this terror machine, but now it had part of my information – I was halfway checked out – and there was no off ramp. The choice popped up for a printed statement or to have it emailed. I immediately hit the email option, wanting to avoid trying to figure out just where and when the printed statement might be dispensed.

The evil screen politely requested that I enter my email address. Dang! I was low on oxygen, but knew I must be near the summit of this customer service ascent. With my last bit of strength, I punched down on the “m” for bill.cusick@voxinc.com. I had finished! I could now walk out the door and leave this cursed lobby.

The screen blipped for a second, and then it seemed that I could hear the devil laughing as the kiosk pushed the dagger in: “please confirm by reentering your email address.”

AAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!

Yeah, I know. You already know your customer, right? After all, you have the latest satisfaction survey results (apparently many are “satisfied;” way to go!), and last year you installed the latest, greatest CRM system. You know everything!

Or not. Fact is, most companies need a map to find a clue about what makes their customers tick. A study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council appearing in this TMCnet.com article proves the point. While all the companies surveyed claim that focusing on customer experience and retention is a corporate priority, you couldn’t tell it by what they are actually doing.

And I quote: “Just six percent of marketers say they have ‘excellent knowledge’ of the customer when it comes to demographic, behavioral, psychographic and transactional data, while over 50 percent report they have ‘fair, little, or no’ knowledge of the customer.”

Many companies already have the behavioral data to get a solid grasp on what they can do to improve customer experience and retention. It’s right under their nose, it’s important, and yet, nothing happens.
Yes, customers are irrational. But you can find “the truth” by analyzing their behavior.

You just have to bother to look.

One thing about people: we really like ourselves.

We enjoy our own company and, by extension, we’re drawn to other people and things that are familiar and remind us of ourselves. Different people and ideas, by contrast, tend to cause us anxiety and we need some time to adapt.

Well, according to article in the New York Times, this positive association with all things that are “us” extends to our names…and even to the letters in our names. There’s even a label for this dynamic: the name-letter effect.

People feel a kinship with their namesakes, Googling them regularly. The article notes studies suggesting that “Johnsons are more likely to wed Johnsons, women named Virginia are more likely to live in (and move to) Virginia, and people whose surname is Lane tend to have addresses that include the word ‘lane,’ not ‘street.’”

It’s a nutty concept (dare I say “irrational?”), but there is evidence to support it. So what do we take away from it?

Just this: when you’re dealing with prospects and customers, keep in mind that they may not be looking for the next, best, cutting-edge thing. Often we want something familiar, something that isn’t about “new,” but rather about comfort, that connects back to who we already are.

In other words: save the pizzazz, and give them what they already know.

What was that? Did he say College Park, or was that Airport? I panicked, just for a second. Should I hop off? Is this my stop? My stomach did a quick nervous flip.

I was in Atlanta, on the MARTA, the city’s admirable (for the most part) public transit system. I had just left the Hyatt downtown after speaking at a conference and was heading for the airport.

For once, I had enough time to not hurry to catch a flight, though the “Quick Checkout” kiosk in the Hyatt lobby did its inhuman best to delay and frustrate me. That kiosk is possibly worth a separate post, but back to the MARTA.

The train I hopped on was spacious and clean. I was reasonably sure I was heading the right way (south) and I was about 75% sure that the airport was the last stop. Still, I’d never ridden the MARTA, and there was no map evident within my sightlines.

“This is “Iripclssenson,” came the soft, bored, almost inaudible voice through the disembodied speakers. I keyed on the two other passengers with rolling overnight bags. I figured when they got off, we must be at the airport. Of course, the airport ended being the last stop, so it would have been hard for me to screw it up. But that didn’t keep me from experiencing a very emotional, anxiety-filled ride.

On Chicago’s century-old L trains, which I ride every day, there’s a Disney-fied, chipper voice that clearly states which stop we’re arriving at, and which stop is next. It’s a bit soulless maybe, and happy clarity doesn’t matter one way or the other to regular riders, who know their stops by heart.

But it keeps the adrenaline from pumping and heart rates from racing for the uninitiated.

We often react more powerfully to one product design over another, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with function, like here. If you look at the picture, your first thought is probably not, “wow, that looks like a really functional flash drive.”

It’s a great example of solid anthropomorphic design, which plays on our subconscious tendency to attribute human characteristics to inanimate objects. And some say it’s cute.

I miss my Mini.

I leased a Mini for a few years. It was a Cooper S (the “S” is for supercharged), silver with a contrasting black top and a sunroof. I ordered it with leather interior, a six-speed manual transmission, and the “John Cooper Works” upgrade, which tweaked the engine up a couple horsepower at the factory.

I built the car online, selecting each aspect of my creation carefully and whimsically at the same time. My Cooper S was built in England. I watched its progress on the Mini site, as it went from an order to a plethora of pieces coming together at the factory. Then I followed it (I call it “it,” but many of my fellow Mini owners named their cars) as it was loaded on a ship sent across the big pond, and slowly made its way to my dealer.

The car was not very sensible – or one might say rational – for where I lived, just outside Chicago: what with the more than occasional bumper-to-bumper traffic, my clutch leg would often get sore. Come to think of it, it wasn’t a very rational decision overall. The ride was firm-to-painful because of the super stiff suspension, and the backseat was a joke, especially if I tried to transport my wife and three kids at once.

But I didn’t care.

It was cool, sitting low on the pavement, unlike my neighbors’ assorted Honda Odysseys and Accords. And it was a blast to drive. With the six speed and the go-cart chassis and big round speedometer, I couldn’t help but whip around corners and in and out of freeway traffic with aplomb.

It wasn’t the fastest car around, or the most powerful, or the most comfortable, or the most spacious. It was just, for me, the right car.

Last year my son was getting his driver’s license, and I decided the Mini could get him in trouble with its unstated demand to be driven fast. I bought another hatchback – stylish but safe.

I can’t tell you what part of my subconscious the Mini tweaked, what particular feature makes a difference in the overall experience. But I can tell you this: I miss the Mini, and I’ll forget the car I’m now driving a week or two after I let it go.

I’ve been doing more speaking recently, particularly around the idea that customer satisfaction is, in so many words, b.s.
While I explore the full concept in an article that was published in marketingprofs.com recently (with a copy on our site here), the gist is short and sweet. There are three reasons you can’t trust satisfaction research results: 1) people don’t speak up; 2) when they do talk, they often lie (sometime just to be polite; other times to avoid confrontation); and 3) customers can’t tell the truth even if they wanted, since they (and we) are all irrational.

And the more I discuss this – as well as what our company does – I keep coming back to the same thought. All of this – figuring customers out, attempting to create a certain type of customer experience, all of it – revolves around one principle: behavior. It’s not by asking that you determine how a customer will behave in a certain situation. The answer, instead, is looking at the past and current behavior of your customers. And it’s not by trying to figure out how to make a customer feel a certain way that you’ll meet your business goals, it’s figuring what specific behavior you want to elicit.

Obviously, if your business goal, for example, is to get a customer to buy an additional product from you, you must create certain emotions that lead to that action. But the emotions and the “soft stuff” then becomes a requisite of the business goal. It’s inherent in the strategy and execution.

Let’s let that idea simmer for awhile. Feel free to tell me if you think I’m full of it.

A couple weeks ago, when Chicago was getting hammered by snow, I was stuck with a couple of coworkers in the Philadelphia airport. We were booked on an American Airlines flight, then watched on the big board as it flashed from “Delayed” to “Canceled.”

Interestingly, at that moment, the small group of happy AA employees hovering near the gate mysteriously vaporized, leaving one lonely sacrificial lamb to deal – one-by-one – with 150 upset passengers. “No, you don’t get any vouchers for food or hotel, since it’s weather related.” Luckily, we were able to call our travel service, American Travel (whom I highly recommend) and get booked on another AA flight three hours hence.

We were pointed to the baggage area to get our luggage back (I know, not smart to check bags when the weather is questionable). The employee we found there, smirked and said, “Well, I’m supposed to tell you to go to the office over there, but your best bet is to go back to Ticketing.” As a customer, this is a hard message to interpret, but we were tired, just shrugged and slogged back to Ticketing, with its long lines, and eventually got our bags.

Needless to say, the flight we had weaseled our way on was canceled about an hour before boarding. We managed to scramble and get three seats on a 10:00 the next morning, then scramble some more to find a hotel for the night. We waited about an hour for a shuttle to take us to the local Sheridan. It was, of course, under renovation (as have been the last three hotels I’ve enjoyed).

The next morning, all flights looked to be on time. As soon as we got through security, we looked at the big board: “Canceled.” Panic. No employees to be found in the vicinity. Another very long line. Another call to our travel service, We jumped airlines, to US Air, and – though it was delayed twice – it eventually went wheels-up around 2:00.

The moral of this story? Well, one lesson is to probably avoid traveling with me. But the other is that, customers are at their most irrational and insecure at times like these – hoping to get home, or to a meeting, or wherever, and not in control of their own destiny. And yet, in these exact instances, the airlines respond with less information, less access to employees, no reassurances, and no empathy.

The customer must “work the system.” It’s the road warriors – the people with 2 million frequent flier miles – who have a clue what to do when something changes. The rest of the herd stands there, dumbfounded, anxious, gazing blankly at the horizon.
The entire process, from the moment you buy a ticket to the moment you get in a cab on the other end, seems to be designed based on the needs of the FAA, the TSA, the airport, and the airlines. Into this random and cold morass the customer must dive and survive.

There is an incredible opportunity here for somebody to start really getting creative – to throw out the assumptions and the flawed perspective and build an incredible experience, one that focuses on the emotions that are at play for most customers. Are we irrational? Of course! That’s where the money is! Airlines need to recognize and acknowledge it, to embrace it. Create an experience that is injected with concepts like caring and engagement, and you will rule the travel world!

(And, oh by the way, Vox can help with that).