My husband, three children and I recently returned from a three-week vacation in Malaysia. It was an amazing trip for all of us; one that was full of entirely new sensory experiences. We listened to the sounds of afternoon prayer calls emerging from the myriad mosques, the rustle of monkeys jumping through trees and the call of the hornbill. We enjoyed the smells of incense burning outside Buddhist temples. We felt the bare floor boards beneath our feet - as it is a cultural faux pas to wear ones shoes indoors in Malaysia. We indulged in the complex tastes of Indian, Malay and Chinese cuisine including Nasi Lemak (coconut rice and anchovies) for breakfast.
But, as a Customer Experience professional, what also followed me home was how my expectations of the customer experience were constantly influencing the experience itself.
Particularly, I found myself thinking about one of the fundamental building blocks of Forrester’s Customer Experience Pyramid – how easy the company is do business with. And in Malaysia the typical evaluation would be “not very easy at all.”
Our exposure to this began with attempting to book internal flights on Air Asia. Air Asia is the world’s best low-cost airline – and it’s not hard to see why. The flights are abundant and cheap to all corners of that part of the world, and they typically take off on time. However, we were baffled by how anybody actually manages to book a flight on this airline. The online booking process requires multiple clicks and pages, countless “opt-out” options, and a threatening “timing out” feature. After spending 90 minutes on the website, declining all of the added extras, and inputting all of the information about each of our five travelers, the website refused to allow us to make the final reservation.
We had a similar experience purchasing tokens in the subway in KL. To achieve this we needed to feed 16 individual 1 Ringgit notes (worth about $0.30 each) into the ticket machine. After painstakingly inserting 15 out of the 16 – a process that took about 7 minutes - the machine would decide it was ‘full’ , spit all of our notes back out at us and ask that we start all over again. This excruciating process left me longing for the familiar inconveniences of the public transportation company in my native home of Philadelphia.
Beyond the airlines and subway, it seemed that most experiences are actually designed to keep the customer at bay. In restaurants, receiving basic service such as a refilled drink, the dessert menu, or the check required the patience of Job. The taxis to and from the airport will happily squeeze in five passengers, as long as you have no more than one suitcase. Parking spaces nearest the building entrances of hotels, public parks and museums are reserved for staff, leaving the customers to take the spaces farthest away. Businesses are “hidden” in out-of-sight places and inconvenient locations, frequently featuring little to no signage indicating how to actually get inside of them. One great example of this is Malaysia’s most famous designer, Peter Hoe, whose gallery of beautiful batik art is located on the 3rd floor of the Rubber Building in Kuala Lumpur’s Chinatown – a large yellow art deco building with an entrance hidden on the side.
I’m slowly re-acclimating to being back in the States. I’m pleasantly surprised by the wait staff who ask me how my meal is, shocked by the ease of purchasing a Septa pass, and even feeling ok about the normally irritating abundance of Labor Day sale signs in shop windows begging for my business. But the trip left me thinking about how our expectations change the experience. If someone from Malaysia were visiting Philadelphia would they find our large taxi trunks to be a waste of space? Would the focus on commerce disgust them? Would they be delighted by our friendly wait staff or would our incessant efforts to “make it easy” leave them feeling rushed and uncomfortable?
My time in Malaysia made it readily apparent how my cultural biases and expectations shaped my experience as a customer over there. Putting anthropology and geography aside, the same lesson applies to industries. The restaurant guest also works with a large accounting firm for his audit. The insurance buyer also downloads books for her Kindle. The airline traveler also manages a call center. The IT guy is also an avid music lover. How are those other industries shaping what these people expect of you? When it comes to the customer experience we’re not just competing against those in our industry or geography, we are competing against all experiences that shape and change the expectations of the customers we seek to win.
–Kate Feather
