User experience is critical to the success of a business.
As I work on community engagement plans for a startup Washington metro news operation, I know that the user experience we provide will determine our success. We need to give users the news they want. We need to help users engage with us and each other in meaningful and fun ways. They need to enjoy spending time with us and tell their friends they should spend time with us.
If they don’t enjoy spending time with us and don’t find our content useful, or if they find their time with us annoying or unpleasant, no amount of excuses or rules will make that experience right.
As if to underscore the importance of user experience, Mimi and I have been having some horrible user experiences lately with United Airlines and the U.S. Postal Service.
In early February, Mimi booked a flight to Jacksonville, Fla., for a family gathering in mid-March. Booking that far in advance, we bought her ticket at a discount (but still at a hefty price, $461.40). She would be leaving a week before our first grandchild’s due date, but that was the best time that worked for her siblings and the other relatives who were coming. And we knew of plenty first babies (including ours) who arrived well after the due date.
When you buy a discounted ticket that early, you click that you understand it’s not refundable and that the airline will really screw you if you try to change it. Those are the airline’s rules, but that’s not a good user experience. Keep in mind that advance booking is not just a favor to the traveler. It’s a huge favor to the airline industry as well and helps them fill up their flights.
I understand that the airline rules originated for a reason. If the airlines had no restrictions on last-minute changes, they might have way too many cancellations and changes to operate effectively. Even with the restrictions they have, airlines overbook flights regularly, because they would rather anger passengers by bumping them from their scheduled flights (or use free future flights to entice them to volunteer for a later flight) than fly with a few empty seats from last-minute cancellations.
But the airlines have built barriers so high that they create a horrible user experience when life presents last-minute challenges, as life sometimes does.
Our daughter-in-law went into labor the night before Mimi was supposed to leave for Jacksonville on a 12:21 flight. Julia arrived at 11:02 the next morning and her grandmother wouldn’t be able to see and touch her until about noon. United Airlines was inflexible in rescheduling Mimi’s flight, charging outrageous fares, plus a penalty, for flights that were already overbooked. And when I refused to pay the higher price, they told me she could try flying standby on the later flights, but they didn’t tell me those flights were already overbooked.
Granddaughter Julia, worth missing a flight
Mimi stayed to see her new granddaughter. Then she wasted a trip to the airport in an attempt to get a standby seat on a later flight (and was treated rudely by the United agent at Dulles). We paid more than $300 for her to fly on Delta (two flights badly delayed by weather) the next day.
The tale of woe continued on Mimi’s return trip. United canceled the flight because of mechanical difficulties and Mimi ended up flying home on a US Airways flight 24 hours later.
I won’t bore you with the full story here, though you can read my exchange with their “Customer Solutions” representatives on the Scribd document below. (I also won’t bore you with more baby pictures, but if you care, you can see them on my Flickr page).
But here’s the bottom line: In one personal encounter, three phone calls and four emails, only two of eight United employees spent more time trying to provide satisfaction than trying to make excuses (and that’s all rules are to the customer). One actually said Mimi “never intended” to take the original flight (either ignoring or not bothering to read my original complaint). When Mimi chose (at the last minute) to miss her scheduled flight, that was clearly our fault. But when United canceled the return flight, that was just tough luck. The whole experience was so one-sided and so exasperating that we probably didn’t adequately appreciate the efforts of the two employees who did provide a measure of satisfaction, obviously bucking their corporate culture. Most of my dealings with United employees showed that they valued their rules more than their customers.
If you think my experience was unique, listen to the Dave Collins song “United Breaks Guitars” (8 million-plus views), check the #unitedsucks hashtag, where Mimi isn’t the only complaining passenger recently, Google “United sucks” (22,500 hits) or follow @UALFail on Twitter.
The arrogance and inflexibility that came through in most of my dealings with United reminded me a lot of the attitudes I encountered at too many newspapers where I worked and consulted. We had our rules (all of them, in our minds, rooted in the Mother of all Rules, the First Amendment) and we operated by them, even at the cost of alienating our communities. And when technology presented new opportunities, our rules and our rigidity kept us from pursuing those opportunities. And our arrogance fooled us into thinking we would always be indispensable.
User experience is always on my mind as I work with Allbritton Communications colleagues to plan our new metro news operation. We absolutely can’t afford the unpleasant experience too many companies offer. We need to aspire to and deliver a pleasant experience that delivers the useful news and information people need, when and how they want it. With no excuses.
The U.S. Postal Service is another example of an operation where user experience is a low priority. When I was moving from Iowa to Virginia, I went online to usps.com and registered my forwarding address. The site gave me a confirmation message, so I presumed that beginning Feb. 20, mail would be forwarded to our temporary apartment in Virginia.
On March 1, when we had not yet received a scrap of forwarded mail, I called to see what was up. After I reached the correct post office in Iowa (you can’t find a number to dial it directly), I was told that the forwarding order had been processed incorrectly. I repeated my new Virginia address, adding the apartment number, because I didn’t yet know the apartment number when I placed the forwarding order online. The polite postal employee told me that she would make sure our mail got forwarded and that the carrier would pick up the mail in our box and send it to us. OK, mistakes can happen. It seemed like they were taking care of it. At that point, I was mostly pleased.
By the next week, we were getting our new mail forwarded, but the mail that accumulated for more than a week never arrived. After two more calls to the Iowa post office that week, I learned that the only forwarding order in the national database was an order from 2008, when we moved from Virginia to Iowa. The station manager was puzzled that we were getting any forwarded mail because he couldn’t find an order for it. He did eventually confirm that our accumulated mail had gone out by Priority Mail (nine days earlier), but they had no tracking number. I checked multiple times at the office of our apartment building and it was never delivered here. The Iowa station manager said it would be returned to Iowa eventually if it was somehow missent, and they would express it to us.
As we continued waiting for our held mail to show up, Mimi wondered whether, with that 2008 forwarding order still alive in the postal computer system, they could have sent our accumulated Iowa mail to the wrong Virginia address. With another phone call to the Iowa post office (my fourth, unless I lost track), I found that yes, they had sent the accumulated Iowa mail to my 2008 Virginia address, not the address I had given them online and over the telephone in 2010.
The mail was not at our 2008 Virginia address (though lots of mail that was never forwarded in 2008 was there) or at the post office serving that address. Mimi and I had no optimism about finding our mail there. When we lived there, we had so many problems with the service that we called our carrier “Newman” after the “Seinfeld” character who laughed about providing bad service.
Think of how many private businesses over the years have blamed lost products (accurately or not) on the post office. I just never realized that the post office itself used the lost-in-the-mail excuse.
Of course, the Postal Service is in trouble. I can’t pretend that I know all the solutions to its economic problems. But I know that user experience is as critical to that organization’s future as it is to the future of our startup.
We still don’t know where our mail is. But fortunately we pay most of our bills online and communicate mostly by email and social media.
The Buttry Diary 
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