Kevin Ptak, Head of Marketing Communications at FUJIFILM Business, reflects on his recent holiday in the Cook Islands and explores how customer experience (CX) expectations translate to travel. Through his observations, Kevin examines whether it's fair to carry the same CX expectations we have at home while abroad and offers insights for marketers on bridging the gap between expectations and reality. He highlights the importance of personalised experiences, customer journey mapping, and embracing new technologies to improve CX. Read below to know more.

Last month I was on holiday for a couple weeks in the Cook Islands – a welcome retreat from Auckland’s rain to warmer temperatures and a chance to disconnect from work. Or so I thought.

I couldn’t help but note a few observations about the customer experience both in the lead-up and during the trip that could apply whether on holiday in the South Pacific or behind your desk in New Zealand.

While we often have expectations about customer experience in our daily lives, is it fair to take these expectations with us while travelling, and should we be disappointed if reality doesn’t match? And more practically, what can we do as Marketers when CX expectations aren’t met?

Setting Expectations

Before the trip I joined a Facebook group for holidaymakers to swap travel tips, ask questions, and generally plan their holiday. And while it was enormously helpful, time after time I got to see the expectation setting that goes into planning these types of trips.

There were questions about towel service being provided for snorkel trips; whether the air conditioning at a resort was sufficiently cold, and whether it was prudent to bring your own snacks rather than suffer the hardship of a more limited selection and higher prices.

There would be inevitable challenges for tour operators, hospitality providers and retailers on Rarotonga in being able to meet some of the expectations being set for comfort, selection and pricing. In a place where hot water showers can be a luxury, how could a snorkel tour operator ever measure up by offering a rinse-off station out of a hose from a shed on a beach?

The Great Reset

Pacific Islands like these are just a few hours’ flying time away from New Zealand, English is often spoken and sometimes they even use the same currency, It can be easy to forget that even in familiar situations you’ve still crossed an international border where things may not line up with how they do at home.

Some of these expectations may not seem like asking very much: where there’s a published bus timetable, it might seem reasonable to expect the bus would show up approximately on time – especially where there’s only one or two bus routes.

But in a different culture with other societal norms, it would perhaps be more reasonable to expect the bus to get there when it got there – a concept sometimes referred to as ‘island time’.

Park Your Frustrations

Staying with the bus example, of late there is an app that will now let you track the position of Rarotonga’s buses in real-time. This is perhaps a better answer to having a timetable, and at least for those overseas visitors that have data on their smartphone it’s a way to make the customer experience a little less frustrating. In my experience it was brilliant and helped me get around easily.

But a smartphone app can’t be the answer to all customer experience expectations. In most cases, there might be a need to reset these before customers even arrive. But that’s a lot easier said than done.

Building Bridges

Finding ways to bridge the gap between customer experience expectations and reality is a challenge across many industries and sectors. When Aquila looked at this gap in an international study a few years ago, it looked more like a yawning chasm: 90% of customers believed most brands fail to meet their customer experience expectations.

Marketers agreed with them too – 94% said customers were right! What’s changed in that time however is the number and quality of digital tools now available to help improve some aspects of the customer experience.

Tools like AI and improvements in customer journey mapping and automation can go some way toward helping deliver more personalised experiences. One recent survey and infographic from NICE showed that 84% of customers said that AI will improve their experiences in the future.

So what can marketers do right now?

●      Clearly map the customer journey
●      Focus on creating personalised experiences
●      Embrace new tools and technologies

Conclusion

We Marketers have a real challenge on our hands: very few customers expect that companies will be able to meet their CX expectations. Resetting those expectations would certainly help, but in the absence of being able to change the customer mindset we can start looking at emerging technologies to help us with tools that deliver more personalised experiences and a better customer journey.

Meanwhile, the whale watch tour operators of Rarotonga can at least start asking the whales to show up on time for the scheduled afternoon boat tours.

Source: Kevin Ptak, 6 September 2024