Miami Airport?s employees are taking classes in customer service from Disney, which is an incredibly bright bulb idea [hypertext]. The similarities between the two environments couldn?t be greater, as are the differences. Visiting a Disney theme park should be a miserable experience.?[Is it?] Long lines are endured.?Food is served. Attractions are findable.?And there?s consistently useful communication between Disney staffers and their ?guests?.?This makes your average airport experience seem like Dante?s journey into the Inferno, only minus the poetry. Lines, food, directions… it?s all bad, and then gets worse, as airline personnel often seem less like they?re holding the pitchforks and moving the damned along, and more like fellow inmates.?Contrast the implicit promise of any airline ad with the explicit punishment travellers endure at either end, and you come up with this odd sense that airline branding can aspire to little more than claims to a pleasant Purgatory.
Actually, it?s not so odd. Airlines seem to relegate airport experiences into the same category in which we put bad weather, stepping in gum, and other inconveniences of circumstances or Fate.
That?s why it?s so interesting that Miami Airport is trying to improve the experience. Disney could certainly help the workers at MIA learn to stop treating travellers as intruders.
Airline branding is all about experience and services.? Since a plane is a plane, and the areas for differentiation seem to be before and after flights. The major areas to accomplish this differentiation would be in airports.
Ultimately, you can ask poorly-paid people to smile as they deliver non-answers, but the key to real customer service is to empower (and incentivise) them to [delight].?
Dimbulb
dimbulb.typepad.com
