Given this title, you probably wonder what the relationship between a suitcase and customer experience could be.

Well, I don’t know, too, and this story is more about how a suitcase and customer experience are related to each other.

Imagine the following not so uncommon scenario: you are on a multi sector flight, one of the early sectors is delayed. You barely make your last sector – your check-in luggage doesn’t. It takes a detour to your destination airport instead.

Sounds familiar? I would be surprised, if not.

And it shouldn’t be a problem as there are well established procedures to report this and to get a more or less timely delivery of your delayed luggage. Or so you think.

The good news is that the airline (kudos to AA at this point) proactively informed about this situation via text already in flight. With this, there is no lengthy wait at the belt that ends in a disappointment but a direct way to the airline counter to organize the delivery to your hotel. So, you give some details including the hotel that you are going to stay in for the next days. The service person announces the suitcase’s arrival for probably today and likely tomorrow. For the sake of the story, “today” means Monday, so, “tomorrow” is Tuesday.

Not ideal, but fair enough, given that the suitcase will likely be handed to a package delivery service and not transported individually.  Time to happily go on with your day. After all things are sorted and in the capable hands of professionals.

Customer orientation at work and a positive customer experience. All of us can tell stories galore about how bad airline service is – but then we might exaggerate them a little. Maybe, just maybe, airlines are better than their public reputation? But seriously, we tend to tell the juicy stories as they are far more interesting than positive ones. After all, good news is no news.

To cut it short, after the airline’s handover to the delivery service, things went south.

Why? Because the delivery process is optimized on “efficiency” to a fault.

“Efficiency” translates to making it as simple for the delivery service, based on a few assumptions like

• the given address is a residential address,
• there is someone at the address who is eagerly waiting for the package to show up
• there is no need for real-time information about where the package is at any given time
• it is enough that there is a notification that the package was delivered or that the delivery failed
• the first way customers try to approach the service is via phone (that’s why this is made hard)
• and more.

Imagine the following scenario. The delivery address is a hotel. It being a fairly small one, it also doesn’t have a reception – which you didn’t know on booking. As you are on a business trip, you are not sitting in your hotel room the whole day.

In combination with the assumptions above this is a recipe for disaster.

Of course, the next day delivery failed. “Address not found”. Hmmm.

So, you hit the next fast fashion shop. After all, you do not want to wear your clothes another day.

And you peruse the delivery tracker to change the delivery to something more recognizable. Options are: Drop the package at location along with some more details. Drop it off at a neighbor. This option includes a geofence of around 50m – and of course, you do not know anybody in that range. After all, you are on a business trip and not at home. Change the delivery date. Use a parcel shop – this one greyed out, so cannot be selected. The fourth one is choosing another date, which really isn’t helpful.

So, what to do? Have them drop it off in the hotel carport as there really is no better option and as there are no really valuable items in there.

The confirmation comes promptly, confirming your “wish” and desire to have your package dropped off and that you thereby accepted their conditions of assuming no liability at all.

So, the service provider’s unwillingness to provide a decent service is turned into your wish. From a customer perspective, you just chose the least evil option of the ones offered to you.

You swallow hard, inform the landlord about a package being dropped off in his carport and await next day’s delivery.

Just that there is none. Neither on Thursday, nor on Friday. So, you hit the fast fashion store some more …

In the meantime, you found a not so obviously placed support form and a phone number (yes, a real phone number). So, being a good customer, on Friday morning, you use the contact form and create a ticket. The automated response comes immediately. “We will take care of your request and get back to you.” No response time commitment. And no response by Friday evening.

So, you call the hotline on Saturday – amazing that it is even available on a weekend.

You get told that the wait time is more than 10 minutes. And” your call is important to us”. And Really? Sigh.

And then you get exposed to some annoyingly upbeat muzac with interspersed announcements in an excited tone about the great tracking possibility and up-to-the minute information that are provided by the website and app. And do you know that you can easily change the delivery options from there?

Your annoyance mounts.

Half an hour later a clearly overworked call center agent who somewhat speaks the country’s language picks up. Now, keep your composure, she is the one who is least responsible for all of this. She’s merely the poor person who needs to deal with pent-up anger.

So, let’s go ahead and change the delivery address to something that is more promising. Sorry, sir, I cannot do this as it can get changed only once – which happened by providing consent to dropping the package in the car port.

Sigh.

Ok, but when is it scheduled for delivery? Next Tuesday. Ok, time for some more shopping.

And. You are leaving on Wednesday early morning, back overseas. So, what happens if Tuesday’s delivery fails? Oh, can I get that delivery address, please? Sure. So, there is at least a fallback in place – hopefully, given the service performance so far.

Then five automated questions that got announced as quality-of-service questions, but in reality are questions about the quality of the service delivered by the poor agent. And to add insult to injury, the chatbot implementation sucked. Really sucked.

Monday mid-morning you receive an email in response to your ticket. There was confusion about the address. “Your package will usually be delivered within the next 1-3 business days.” Well, that would have been the previous Friday at the latest …

Tuesday mid-morning.

The tracking site still locates your luggage in the delivery center.

So, you respond to the email with the unequivocal request to not attempt another delivery at the hotel but to deliver the package to your home address – which is on another continent.

And which is a request that they cannot accommodate for – as the EU GDPR law prohibits it. Or rather their interpretation of it. I call BS on that argument. If they had said that the traveler is not the customer as the airline gave the order, this would be understandable, but privacy? C’mon.

Recommendations for travelers

None of what I write now is an excuse for the poor service delivery of the parcel provider. They deliberately make it easy for themselves. “Efficient” translates to cheap and not customer oriented.

Still, there are some ways to avoid their services. And this should be the objective.

First the obvious one. Layovers of a decent length help with luggage troubles. One hour often cuts logistics time short. The second on is similarly obvious: Have some changes of clothes in your cabin luggage. The third, and most important one is to make sure at the airline counter that they provide as much information as possible to the parcel service as possible. Ideally, provide an address where someone can receive your luggage all day – as unlikely as this is, especially in a business travel setting.

And what about service providers?

There is really no blame to lay on AA apart from them probably having a need to look out for a better logistics partner. Their current one, at least the one they used to help me, damages not only the own but in extension the AA brand.

The logistic service provider’s processes are clearly centered around themselves and not about providing a solution for their customers. There is poor communication, very limited ways to update the information they might require for the delivery and, generally, as listed in the beginning of this article, lots of questionable assumptions. All of these should be addressed in a business process redesign. Chief of what should be addressed is that the current process is designed around what I call the “happy path” – the path that does not encounter any problem. This one creates a smooth customer experience. However, this path has many pieces that need to be in perfect order. If any of these pieces is not, the process fails catastrophically. This causes not only a bad customer experience but incurs significant additional cost for the company. Points to consider here start with a tracking that gives customers an ETA of their delivery – and keeps it up to date. That way, people can plan. No one, and I mean no one, will happily stay bound to one place for a whole day, not talking of several days. This works in other businesses, too. Second, offer several easy ways of communications, supported by a digital agent. Do not assume that people, who may be from abroad, will call in and wait for prolonged times in a queue while paying international roaming fees. Offer messengers on top of this. Have a well-working agent connected to it that actually can answer questions and is not the text or voice equivalent of the good ole phone tree. Do not assume that the first thing people do is pick up the phone. They do this because the other ways you offered truly sucked and didn’t give them the desired result or anything close to it. As a business, you do want to avoid a costly contact center, too. Consequently, invest into scenarios and technologies that customers actually want to use. If you get this done, the load on the call center naturally decreases. Trust me, people do not want to phone in to your call center. In 2025, there are better ways with less friction to come to a result.

Lastly, and that is probably the easiest but not the cheapest one: Ensure proper staffing in your call center and at the very minimum, do not make customers wait listening to music that makes them even angrier while listening to announcements that are blatantly wrong, and/or offer options that already did not work.

Do you feel like your processes can do with an overhaul and are interested in an informal, no-nonsense conversation without any obligations, contact me. I might be able to help you. After all, CRM and customer experience are my business.