There was a time when Emirates Airlines was the challenger brand, when all the planes were shiny and new and the staff felt part of something exciting. There is little doubt that they put the more traditional airlines, like British Airway on notice, that complacency would not be tolerated by the flying public.
But eventually the challengers become the norm and cost cutting and commercial realities mean that corners are cut and the level of service drops a little, or a lot.
This weekend, I tried to buy a flight on the Emirates Android App. It didn’t work. I tried on the iPad App, it didn’t work. I tried on the website, it didn’t work. The error message was the same each time,
Sorry, we have a technical problem at the moment, please try again later.
This is the kind of laziness that creeps in when you are cutting costs or not hiring the best people. Outsource the tech to somewhere, and neglect to spec out the appropriate ‘negative journeys’.
The problem with the error message is that it is generic. There is no way to troubleshoot it because it doesn’t say what the actual problem is. Admittedly, Emirates is a complex business with hundreds of thousands of user journeys and millions of business rules and you can’t write a specific error message for every single possible ‘edge case’, however – you should be able to narrow down an error to something more appropriate than ‘technical problem’.
Eventually I ended up booking the flights with DNATA, and they had no issues, so the problem was not with the booking system. The problem must have been with the logic in the Apps and the website. I can’t believe I am the only one who has experienced these problems, so the lost sales is potentially huge, not to mention to negative sentiment and frustration it causes.
Once the ticket was bought, I tried to check in using the iPad App. For some reason, my personal details – Date of Birth, Passport number etc, don’t move with me across devices, despite having a single ‘Frequent Flyer’ number across all touch-points of the customer journey.
The reason I couldn’t check in on the Ipad App is because entering your Date of Birth is impossible. I tried, because UI/UX is part of my job, and I could not enter my date of birth. The scrolling selection interface always spins back to another date. I really want someone to show me how it’s done. I gave up.
But again, how did this part of the app pass QA testing? Has anyone ever actually tested the journey end-to-end? I can not believe I am the first person ever to have this issue. One imagines that the app was outsourced to some digital agency that charges an arm and a leg for small changes, that the estimate to fix the Date of Birth entry ‘bug’ on the Ipad App was 45 man days and therefore something else was prioritised.
The Android App uses a different, more intuitive, UI/UX and therefore allowed me to enter my Date of Birth, though the app had forgotten my details or got confused somewhere along the way – however. Even though the app allowed me to “Check-in”, it didn’t give me any boarding pass options! Some business rule somewhere. Result – customer frustrated.
It was a one-day business trip, so I had no luggage to check in. But nowhere in the segregated check-in airport process is there a way to get a boarding pass without having to stand in the same line as people with luggage. Or, if there is, none of the people wearing Emirates uniforms know what it is. Result – customer frustrated.
So, I haven’t even received by boarding pass yet and my sentiment about flying with Emirates is pretty low.
There is string of niggling little things during the rest of the journey that did nothing to change how I felt about the experience. On any other day, standing in a packed bus, waiting on the tarmac for 10 minutes would be an unremarkable annoyance, but piled on top of all the other little annoyances, it eats away at my feelings for the Emirates brand.
It’s not like the ‘loyalty’ program has any real benefits. It’s an old-fashioned scheme that values frequency rather than loyalty. While I understand all the arguments about keeping points on the books as a liability and various other commercial implications, it is not a ‘customer first’ mentality that drives the program. According to my Jetlovers profile, I’ve flown with Emirates 32 times over the last 10 years and I have almost nothing to show for it. If I never flew with Emirates again, I would be losing very little.
So while the highly paid Customer Experience consultants argue over hot towels and pretzels during cabin service and try to hoodwink consumers by distracting them with a half decent entertainment system, the overall experience is less than satisfying.
This particular journey, on an Net Promoter Score (NPS) basis would be a fail. I would not be inclined to recommend Emirates to friends and family as a result of this experience.
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