We are all familiar with how stars are used to grade things. Three Michelin Star restaurants serve up the best food money can buy. Five star hotels will expose you to luxury you can only dream off. But an 11-star experience?
While it sounds outlandish, thinking about what a customer’s 11-star experience might entail is something Airbnb founder Brian Chesky credits with his company’s success.
The concept of an 11-star experience is not too difficult to understand. If a zero-star experience is the worst possible outcome a customer can have, an 11-star experience takes fulfillment of consumers’ desire way beyond their expectations.
Think flying to the United Kingdom in a private jet before getting a private tour of London with the entire British royal family and then joining them for a family dinner.
The point of the 11 star experience exercise is to create a scenario that is so unbelievably exciting that you can later move down several steps on the rating to find a sweet spot. There you’ll find the experience is both very positive and, more importantly, feasible.
Read on to see how your airline can brainstorm extremely positive experiences to help identify the best ways of keeping your customers happy.
According to Chesky, Airbnb’s journey to developing the concept of the 11-star experience began with him and co-founder Joe Gebbia visiting hosts. They wanted to see how they could improve the user experience. From there they tried to extrapolate a relatively run of the mill Airbnb experience right up to the most extreme version they possibly could.
“We basically took one part of our product and we extrapolated: what would a 5 star experience be?” Chesky said during an interview with entrepreneur Reid Hoffman. “Then we went crazy.”
The team at Airbnb decided that a five-star experience would see guests arrive at their destination for the hosts to open the door and welcome them in. Nothing too complicated. Then they took this concept and increased the quality of the experience six times.
For Chesky and co, an 11-star experience meant turning up at the airport to meet Elon Musk for a private journey into space.
The whole process became a key part of building the Airbnb customer service philosophy.
“The point of the process is that maybe 9, 10, 11 (star ratings) are not feasible,” Chesky told Reid. “But if you go through the crazy exercise, there’s some sweet spot between “they showed up and they opened the door” and “I went to space.” That’s the sweet spot. You have to almost design the extreme to come backwards.”
How would this work for airlines looking to give their passengers an unforgettable experience? If a 5-star experience is the plane taking off on time and the flight experiencing little to no turbulence, what would an 11-star experience look like?
Lots of factors affecting customer satisfaction in the airline industry, including scaling up positive experiences, will depend on how pilots and cabin crews communicate with passengers during the flight. From taxiing to the runway, to takeoff, and landing, there are plenty of talking points that can raise a customer’s perception of their experience. This approach may not be the most glamorous, but it is important.
So what might this look like? Simply making the safety talk at the start of the flight more fun and interesting, will improve things. Or talking to nervous passengers ahead of takeoff to allay their fears could add a star.
See how Westjet flight attendant gives his safety routine a fun twist
Furthermore, managing expectations in the event things do not go to plan are important. Delays, or problems with the on-flight entertainment don’t need to be huge stressors for the passengers – they simply need to know what’s happening. As we know, good communication is the keystone of great customer service. In aviation it can be the difference between frustration and relief. Or a poor experience and a great one.
Globally, around 1.5 billion people speak English, either natively or as a second language. This means efforts to train your air crews to communicate clearly in English will pay dividends further down the line.
The Pareto principle, first developed in Italy, is an observation that 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes. The saying serves as a reminder that inputs and outputs are not equal.
Since the statement was published in the early 1900s, the rule has been seized upon as a well known rule for customer success.
In part, it is based on the notion that little changes can have a big impact on customer experiences.
On a customer service level, the Pareto principle can be taken to mean that 80% of issues or complaints come from just 20% of causes. Even addressing one of the 20% of causes can have a disproportionately large effect on mitigating some of those issues or complaints.
For airlines, clear communication in good English offers an easy fix for handling customer complaints.
What’s more, doing so in English, as well as the first language of the airline’s home country, is key. This will help guarantee being able to communicate with the overwhelming number of passengers on board.
Luckily, airlines can easily develop and employ planning sessions involving aircrews to find that “sweet spot” Airbnb’s Chesky talks about.
That’s where the customer experience will be positive enough for any given passenger to tell their friends and family about how great the airline was. This is clearly far better than not talking about it at all. Or worse, complaining about it.
In online sessions, training staff can walk aircrews through the concept. Then ask them to create a list of their own. They simply need to lay out the steps from a 1-star to an 11-star experience.
Here are some ideas below:
A one-star experience is a total failure and turns customers away from the business.
This type of experience leaves a bad taste in customers’ mouths, even if problems are solved.
This is the baseline ‘good’ experience. Everything goes to plan and there are no complaints, but it also leaves nothing to write home about.
This is a great experience. Passengers depart happy, glad to tell their social groups about how much they enjoyed the flight.
Now we enter fantasy land, the realm of the improbable. This is a dream scenario.
Utterly impossible, but dare to dream!
This will get your staff thinking about small changes that make a big difference. And even better, it’s a fun and creative exercise.
In the list above, the 7 star experience is clearly the sweet spot that Chesky and his colleagues in Airbnb aim for. It is also in part defined by the crew’s clear communication with passengers to make the flight a more pleasant experience.
With English as the world’s global language, air operators hoping to improve crews’ competency to communicate in English should make use of ELSA for Airline English training purposes.
ELSA is an app that helps professionals work on and improve their English pronunciation, aiding communication. The vast majority of ELSA students report improvements in their pronunciation and greater confidence in speaking English.