On the evening of Sunday 6 August 2023, my wife and I were on a flight back to Johannesburg from Heathrow Airport, London. After boarding, the flight remained on the runway for over an hour without taking off. Eventually, the pilot told us that due to the coup in Niger, the airspace over the country had been closed, and we couldn’t take the pre-planned route. Also, we were informed that we should find our own accommodation and claim it back from the airline, as we wait for further instructions by text message or email.
Back in the airport, we walked up and down the halls of Heathrow Terminal 5 looking for someone to help us find accommodation, but at 1am in the morning everyone had gone home. We tried refreshing the website of the airline but it couldn’t provide us with any more information of what would happen next.
An additional complication was that my wife’s mobile network roaming had not been working since leaving South Africa. Because she had booked the flight, communication would be sent to her phone number, which was not available. We tried phoning her cellphone network provider, and were provided with a number of automated voice prompts that left us at a dead-end. When that failed, a WhatsApp chat-bot sent here a message with options for self-help. That also led to a dead-end where we selected the wrong option by mistake and couldn’t go back to the previous menu. Eventually, after calling again and following a different route through the maze of automated voice-prompts, we managed to speak to someone who helped us.
Next, we searched online for different hotels near the airport, but after calling 4, we found out they were all fully booked. We tried booking online on booking.com, and we did successfully. After spending a lot of money on an Uber to the hotel, we arrived at the reception of the hotel and they told us they were fully booked. After another expensive Uber back to the airport, we slept on the floor in the airport.
In the morning, we walked up and down along the terminal building, but couldn’t find any information desk for the airline to ask for help. We received an email informing us our new flight had moved to Tuesday evening, but we wouldn’t get our checked-in bags until arriving in Johannesburg. Luckily, we ran into someone who was on the same flight who told us “an Indian-looking lady walking around helped him a lot”. We started the search for this “Indian-looking lady”, eventually found her, and she helped us tremendously by finding us a hotel for the night and giving us meal vouchers. The inconvenience of a night on the floor and 2 days lost was at least somewhat comforted.
All of this could have been made so much easier if we had someone to talk to at the very beginning – from the airline, the hotels and the cellphone network providers. There has been a promise made to organisations that they can reduce their human costs by providing automated ways to fulfil customer requests. And this has been amazing for both businesses and customers. I don’t have to go to a bank teller in a branch to withdraw 20 rands. I don’t have to call my cellphone network provider to get my airtime balance. It has made my life as a consumer so much simpler, and reduced the costs of servicing me from the organisation’s point of view.
Yet, as the story above has shown, it would really help if there was human interaction that I had easy access to. It would be great if I didn’t have to go through a maze of voice prompts, or I didn’t have to refresh the webpage hoping for some different information. I have previously written about so-called “digital attacker banks” and the challenge of only having an impersonal digital channel for customer interaction.
One thing a human can also do is handle the nuance and subjectiveness of a customer’s problem. Technology has been promised to remove bias and human limitations in decision making, yet there are some decisions that call for that. Promises have been made that those who are deserving of loans from banks won’t be denied based on some factors such as their race or gender. Yet, on the other hand those who are deemed none-deserving through being reduced to a broth of quantitative factors can now have a better chance at fairness. I was once helping someone by meeting a prospective tenant for their property. By all quantitative factors, he qualified. But after seeing them and speaking to them for 5 minutes, I had a hunch that they’d be a defaulting tenant. They eventually signed the lease, and months later, proved my hunch true.
Technology exists to serve not a predeterminate machine, but the complexity of human experience. Business procedures and protocols can be drawn up for the majority of cases. Yet, the complexity and fluidity of human experience can never fit perfectly into such procedures – human experience ranging from a misunderstanding of the language on the official website, to a coup in a west African country which further closes the airpsace in an already tumultuous region.
Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash
Patrick Kayongo 