Earlier this week Dan and I had a generally awful travel experience on a major airline.  One of those "everything that can go wrong will" type of affairs, where you know it from the moment the first delay is posted that this flight is doomed.  A 5:45 departure became 6:15, 6:40, then 7:00, before the slow boarding and general mayhem got us off the ground around 7:15.  Even worse, the plane itself had tiny overhead baggage compartments, such that even without anything resembling a full flight, about 20 people had to check their carry-ons with the flight attendants.  I sat in an unreclinable seat with a shortened seat belt that barely fit around my waist.  When we landed, we discovered that our bags didn't make it, and would be on the next flight, and would we wait in this line with everyone else to talk to the baggage department to report our lost luggage and make arrangements to have it delivered to us.  And none of any of this was reported by the notification system that I signed up for that week to tell me about these things when they happened.

Part of me says, hey, what can you do, these things happen, and there are worse ways to be crapped on by the airline industry.  The part of me that is still angry had to stop and think.... who to be angry with?  The gate agents tried their best to update the departure delays as they knew.  The flight attendants dutifully reported that overhead space was running out, then helpfully checked our bags, even bringing back the baggage tickets to us in our seats.  The baggage handlers couldn't get all the bags on in time for our departure so they did the next best thing by getting the bags on the next plane.  The pilot made up some of the time in the air.  The baggage claim people knew exactly where our bags were when we gave them the ticket and provided a tracking number for us.  And my (slightly soggy) bag was sitting on my side porch the next morning.  Everyone did their job, right?

Except... the flight attendants KNEW from the start that there wouldn't be enough space on the plane... one of them mentioned to me that this was a model that hadn't had its overhead compartments refurbished yet.  The baggage guy who took our bags must have suspected that he wasn't going to have time to get all those on the plane.  The baggage claim people were practically expecting us when we walked into the office... they knew some bags didn't make it.  And I bet someone, somewhere had a pretty good idea that the flight wasn't going to be only 20 minutes late.  In other words, there was a lot of pretty strong knowledge and evidence lurking in the spaces between roles... stuff that, if communicated, could have either made the experience better for the customers, or possibly resulted in process changes that would address these problems for the next set of customers.

How can a customer service organization see these trees falling in the forest? 

I can imagine that there are on-time reports, lost baggage statistics, and other metrics that airlines can use to monitor performance.  None of those would suggest how to correct these specific problems.  These metrics are TOO big a picture... they're the entire forest, and you can't see how the trees inside are falling.

An organization truly devoted to customer service would find a way to ferret out these problems and fix them.  To provide a more accurate forecasting time for when a plane will actually arrive.  To recognize that this model of airplane is inevitably going to have to check carry-ons and should allow some time to do that.  To proactively notify passengers that they shouldn't wait around 20 minutes to learn that their bags didn't make it.  To verify that automated notification systems are working properly.  In other words, looking like you know what you're doing, and never leaving a customer guessing as to what's gone wrong now. 

This is not just a question of customer service... it affects the bottom line as well.  I can't imagine that waiting 10 more minutes to get the bags loaded was less expensive than personal delivery of those bags to 20 different homes in the Boston area.

By now you see the obvious parallels with a contact center, and the importance of tuning and analyzing a customer care experience to identify any problems.  The 800 number in the agent's script that's been disconnected.  The touchtone option that accidentally disconnects the caller.  The discrepancy between the website's FAQ and the canned answer given by the agent.  The escalations that don't actually escalate.  No doubt there are contact center agents who know that such-and-such doesn't work, and complain about it to other agents or even their supervisor, but how do these get fixed?  In our flight case, many individuals along the way knew that there would be a problem.  But they had no way to communicate it to anyone in charge of the whole process.  You need someone in charge of the customer experience, who is armed with the people and tools responsible for analyzing the entire customer experience.  Then you can find out not just what the problems are but to suggest how to fix them.

Sometimes it's not enough to look at individual trees, nor is it helpful to step back and see the whole forest from afar.  Sometimes you have to actually walk through the forest yourself, so you can see exactly where and how those service interruption trees fall.