Delta Airlines: When Digital Customer Experience Goes Bad

Getting digital experience right is hard. Even the best-intentioned organizations blow it.

There’s little debate on the critical nature of getting digital customer experience right. Every customer experience professional, IT leader, or shareholder-focused senior executive gets it. And we all know it’s dramatically changing the ways companies need to deliver on customer experience.

But getting digital experience right is hard. Even the best-intentioned organizations blow it. Unless it’s tied to a broader, multichannel customer experience strategy, organizations will continue to deliver different and often inconsistent experiences across different channels.

And when you’re dealing with thousands of customers a day, when things go wrong, they go really wrong. For example, Delta Airlines. The company’s flights were grounded by a global system outage earlier this week that brought the airline to its knees.

I started this article from Seat 1D on Delta 1151 from San Francisco to Minneapolis, a flight I was originally booked on a week or two ago, but had to repurchase after Delta “helpfully” canceled my tickets and gave my seats away without notifying me until I got to the airport.

How I got here is a story of digital customer experience gone bad.

One Traveler’s Story

As some of you may have read, Delta was the latest airline shut down due to a power outage that caused its computers to malfunction. Passengers stranded, schedules blown up, customers unhappy.

This is where the company’s digital customer experience strategy kicked in. And where it failed.

For me—and I’m guessing thousands of others—the news on Monday was a brief concern. But the ability to get boarding passes and confirmations the day before the flight assuaged any worries. Then I woke up to a text saying my connecting flight had been canceled.

This wasn’t a problem. As a seasoned traveler, you deal with this kind of thing all the time. I booked a new connecting flight and assumed I was ready to go. Not so fast. Because Delta’s computers kicked in and made a series of automated changes based on a series of false assumptions. Its systems assumed that:

1. I didn’t care when I got to Green Bay.
2. I didn’t need to know about travel changes before I got to the airport.
3. I wouldn’t mind an 18-hour trip with three layovers.

The result? Without notice or consultation, Delta’s systems worked hard against these assumptions, canceling all my tickets, giving away my seats, and rerouting me for arrival nearly 20 hours after my originally ticketed time.

Once I figured out what the airline had done, I repurchased all new tickets and arranged new ground transportation. At the end of the day, I was only three hours later than expected. Why? Because thankfully, I am smarter than Delta’s digital strategy.

When A Digital CX Strategy Ticks Customers Off

Delta’s approach was based on a tried-and-true digital CX strategy: Address customer issues before they occur by leveraging data, systems, and processes to proactively initiate a solution to a potential problem. In CX consulting shorthand? Enabling proactive, pre-emptive digital experiences .

Some of the promise in this type of strategy includes taking proactive action to address issues before they even occur. You can personalize experiences, introduce new services, or provide guidance on existing offerings. By doing this, organizations can preemptively solve individual customer problems before or during an interaction, immediately improving the quality of the experience and increasing their perceived value.

In theory, this should work great. Think Amazon crediting you for a movie’s “substandard playback quality” before you’re even had a chance to notice it. Or—as Southwest did when I was stranded due to that airline’s computer glitch a couple weeks ago—quickly sending me an email promising a $200 voucher on my next flight to compensate for the hassle.

But the successful implementation of this strategy means understanding what your customers actually want or need. You see, from a customer’s perspective the quality of any experience is based on the degree to which it meets a customer’s expectations.

A famously customer-focused organization, Amazon almost certainly leverages its understanding of customers to know when to offer a movie credit. Southwest screwed up, but gave me a $200 apology within a day.

Sorry, Not Sorry

We all get it that things can go wrong. We know that computers and people don’t always work the way we’d like them to. But we all expect that the organizations that wish to serve us will treat their customers with respect. Which means following through on your promises and being sincere.

Adding insult to injury, it appears that Delta is big on apologies, but little action. To date, I’ve received two apology emails (“with sincerest apologies”) and a third that hilariously asked me if I’d recommend the company. Uh, no. And while I’ve heard rumors that Delta is offering compensation, apparently customers have to figure this out on their own and submit a claim form.

This is a critical lesson for any company trying to dig out of an issue like this. When you screw up with a customer, apologies only work if you mean them. Southwest provided one apology email and a $200 voucher. Unlike Delta, the company said it was sorry—and immediately backed it up. If you’re going to (as Delta’s claim form suggests) “make things right, not just make apologies,” it only holds water if you don’t make your customers jump through additional hoops. Insult to injury, anyone?

The reality is that customers are savvy enough to see through yet another organizational fauxpology. Goodness knows, we’ve seen enough from politicians and other executives to recognize them.

No matter how “smart” a digital strategy is, if the organization isn’t aligned on what it takes to deliver against it, it’s destined to fail. So, yes. Delta is in the digital customer experience doghouse and deserves to remain there until it gets its act together. But you can—and should—learn from its mistakes.

[Aug. 20 update: I received an email from Delta 10 days after my flight saying I was “granted an eCert,” which looks a lot like a $200 voucher. The reimbursement for the extra tickets I had to buy? No word yet.]