The last straw was the toddler ramming his stroller into the stranger's legs for the third time. The child's mother was behind a mountain of luggage filling out name tags. A slightly older sister was orbiting at high volume trying to get someone's attention. Anyone's.
I concurred, as did the long queue of passengers waiting for the 2:30 bus. We were all looking for attention. It was 2:55 and there was no sign of the "Toronto Express". Now that we were at risk of personal injury by a rampaging baby, a shudder rippled through the line. There was also no sign of customer service. Not a peep. Not even an announcement over the PA system.
We were growing fidgety, speculating on what had happened to our bus, imagining its whereabouts. A rumour spread among us that it was stuck in the garage, unable to move. This begat more rumours - theories of what might be wrong with it. Questions arose about how well it could be fixed within a short time. Disturbing images came to mind - of being stranded on the deserted roadside, 5 miles past Nowhere, Ontario.
Two years ago, on Christmas Eve, I was stuck in a train without heat or light for 7 hours. These things happen when The System fails.
The System was showing cracks again at the bus terminal. A half hour delay might not seem like much, but my reading of the crowd was that we all felt entitled to an explanation - even just an acknowledgement of our collective irritation.
Where was the customer service person?
I make this trip twice a month and I might have written this all off as just another transit day if I hadn't read Joe Thornley's recent post. Joe also regularly makes the same journey to Toronto but travels by air. In telling the story of his ensnarement by The System, he made me aware of the importance of customer service as an aspect of customer relations.
But this also led me to make the connection to user experience. Increasingly, I tend to think of myself as a user of service systems rather than as a customer. As a user, I'm engaged in indirect communication with service providers through an intermediary system. For me the word 'customer' implies a direct relationship with a service provider in human form. I know this is naive in an on-line age but I stubbornly cling to my humanity.
Nevertheless as a user of the intercity bus system I was painfully aware of the negative user experience that I and my fellow wannabe-passengers were enduring. And this led me to think about the design of the system that makes this all work - or not*.
So where was the customer service representative? Where was the human face that could take the edge off our edginess with a warm smile and a sincere human apology on behalf of the intangible bus system?
The bus didn't arrive until 3pm and seconds later the customer service lady appeared. I felt obliged to put my mouth where my money was so I said "We were looking for you. We needed some customer service here."
And she said, "I'm right here."
And I said, "But where were you half an hour ago when the bus should have departed?"
She gave me a profoundly blank look. I felt as if I was speaking to a machine, not a person. Even then, after I had explicitly stated our collective need for attention, she still showed no sign of acknowledgement of our irritation. Her definition of 'Service' was apparently not that same as that of her Customers.
Is it just a specific case of unprofessional conduct or is it a general deterioration of personal relations that is perhaps symptomatic of an overly on-line culture? I don't know for sure.
But it occurs to me that somewhere in the depths of the bus system there is a Training Program that is supposed to handle this kind of customer relations scenario. The engineer in me imagines that Training Program has some buggy code. The designer in me wonders if that code was written on the basis of solid usability requirements. The customer in me is damn sure it wasn't.
Footnotes
