A Christmas tale of what happens when your service hits the real world

I was just visiting New York City during this week's blizzard with my wife and two young children. We knew there would be some travel issues getting back to Philly, but we were taking an Amtrak train (rather than driving), already had tickets in hand, and felt pretty comfortable that the situation wouldn't be too bad.

Of course, my wife and I have iPhones so we knew we could check the status of the train, and even buy other tickets if necessary.

Here's comes the interesting part, and the main point of this blog post...because I can see up to date status of Amtrak info on my phone, I would expect that Amtrak reservation agents on the phone would have access to the same information...and I would be wrong!

The train we had tickets for got cancelled, so we used our phone to buy tickets for a later train, and that train appeared to be cancelled as well because the status on their site said that due to service interruption, they couldn't even provide departure status (i.e. is the train currently on time?). I called Amtrak and the reservation agent quickly looked into the issue with the train and said it was cancelled...ok, so far so good. Then he said here comes the good news...

The agent then told us to just go down to Penn Station and Amtrak would figure it out down there. I told the agent that trains were starting to sell out, and that my wife was sick, I had two kids with me, and we doubted that just heading on down to the train station was a good idea. The agent then told me about a train that we could be put onto, and that I should stop telling him how to do his job, and to trust the directions that an Amtrak agent was giving him.

Here's the kicker...while he's telling me about a train that he's sure we'll be able to get on, I'm looking at the train's status on my wife's phone showing that it is already sold out! I told him it's sold out, he said it wasn't, and only when I said I'm looking at it on my phone, he went and checked with another system. So basically, his version of the system (which includes technology, people, and his trained skills) were inferior to my version of the system (Amtrak's mobile web site). It's great in one regard that as a customer I have quick access to up to date info on my own, but how can it be that when I actually interact with a live employee, that I get inferior info/service??? That is what service design is all about...not just the usability of the site, not just the customer agent saying "my goal is today is to give you great service" when I call, but how all of these customer "touch points" interaction together, in REAL WORLD situations.

One obvious point to take away from my experience would be to make sure you really do test (e.g., usability test) your system in real world situations...e.g., when this travel chaos was happening because of the blizzard, the Amtrak team responsible for service design, customer service, usability testing, etc actually has a great opportunity to test the system, as opposed to only holding scheduled tests in a fake laboratory-like setting.

One interesting usability/service issue I found from having been on hold for 20 minutes with Amtrak (which will likely only happen when they're really busy) is that every 10 seconds or so the on hold music stops, and it sounds like a live person is coming on; instead there is only a recorded message that tells you that all agents are still busy. Even though after hearing this about 10 times, and already being annoyed about thinking someone is coming on, I still continued to be "tricked" by this...it really sounds like someone is coming on. So, it is impossible to get anything else done, have a conversation, etc while on hold, because it keeps interrupting you. Little things like this build up to the overall experience, and customer/user patience erodes into annoyance.

Please think about this, and take a good look at your business, service, etc, and make sure to look into and apply methods that help you uncover what it's really like to be your customer/user...look for these issues and how they interact together to take away from your intended great experience...and fix them. J