Mark Hurst of Good Experience posted this on how Virgin America improved the user experience of passengers on their flights. Other airlines should learn from this experience.
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How Virgin America’s customer experience turns “boring to better”
Virgin America is my favorite domestic airline, in part because of the way it treats an overlooked part of the flying experience: the safety demonstration. This is the video they show before every flight.
Note just three elements of the experience:
• Design: The video is visually appealing, created as what appears to be a hand-drawn cartoon.
• Humor: It contains real-life actual humor throughout, to keep passengers engaged. (Don’t miss the nun packing up the Linksys router, and the matador sitting next to the bull.)
• Common sense: My favorite moment of the video is where the narrator says, “For the .0001% of you who have never operated a seat belt before, it works like this…” In other words: we acknowledge that most of you already know this, but we gotta read it anyway. Virgin America comes across as a human organization willing to exercise common sense on behalf of the passenger.
Compare this to the safety videos shown on most other airlines: bland staging, “flight attendants” who are probably just hired actors going through the motions, narration straight out of an FAA safety document. No creativity, no joy. Mainly boredom.
Most airlines look at the safety video and say, “It’s a chore we gotta get through.” Virgin America says, “Here’s an opportunity to create a good experience.” The difference in attitude toward that one detail – just one moment in the entire travel experience – speaks volumes about the commitment to customer experience.