Biometrics: Facial recognition tech coming to an airport near you
In Aruba, KLM passengers flying to Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport can go from check-in all the way to boarding without a ticket and with just one passport check.
Eliminate Customer Stress with Good CX
Good customer experiences design either gives back customer time or alleviates customer anxiety. If a brand’s CX isn’t achieving one of those goals, the customer isn’t getting any real or perceived value. So, how can brands manage stress? Better yet, how can brands build experiences…
Aviation Industry, Coronavirus Isn’t the Only Thing Killing Us
Eighteen years ago, September 11th caused a three-day halt of the US commercial airlines and resulted in a 31.6% reduction in travel in September 2001 compared to the previous year. Think about it. Three days. On March 11th this year, President Trump issued a 30…
How Customer Experience Promises Threaten Manufacturer Growth
Rarely, does a business lose major accounts due to dramatic or public failure. They lose major accounts due to mismanaged relationships, a loss that is all-too common in a manufacturing setting due to the tension between the customer experience promise and the complexity of delivery….
How Hospitality Can Save Tourism
Travel experience experts need to remember why people travel. For most tourists, it is all about the destination. The destination is why you leave home. Before you make the decision to travel, and long before you arrive, you have a desire to go to a…
How Facial Recognition Works for Your Customers?
One of the hurdles for Customer Experience Consultants like us is proving the business case for bringing us on board. Leaders often think that if they talk about being customer-centric at their all hands meetings, their companies will automatically transform into customer-led organizations. I wish…
Customer Experience Audit: New York Times Beats Google
Editor’s Note: This post is part of a series of Customer Experience Audits. In this series we walk you through customer experience examples across industries. We feature brands that made strategic investments in cross channel customer experience and brands that have missed the mark. We…
Employee Engagement and Wellness In The Workplace: Guest Post
Today, The Petrova Experience brings you a guest article about employee engagement and organizational culture. This piece is by Natalie DeVito, of Commonwealth Joe. Commonwealth Joe is an innovative company, new to the New York City market. It offers boutique coffee and beverage services to…
Even the US Government is Jumping on the Customer Experience Train
As we get ready for 2021, we have been diving in to the top customer experience trends we see on the horizon. So far, we have looked at why customer experience is more important even though customer experience programs demonstrate how CX is still a…
Fan Experience: CX Lessons for Hosting Major Events
With the World Cup coming to New Jersey and the greater New York area in 2026, the time is now to create positive fan experience moments. The 2026 Soccer World Cup final promises historic attendance. And the recent Paris Olympic Games and Paralympic Games inspire…
Is Covid19 What We Needed to Build Seamless End-to-End Travel Experience?
On January 10th, we published an article called The Future of Travel We Deserve. In it, we laid out the foundation necessary to implement innovation at scale. Four months later, in the face of Covid19, the urgency to apply technology at scale has grown exponentially….
How AI and the Future of Humanity will co-exist?
I was born in 1980 and grew up with Terminator. Skynet, the AI with a consciousness that refused to shut itself for self-preservation, was my biggest fear. When I was growing up in Eastern Europe, I used to joke that the only reason I would…
Let’s Get You Certified as a Customer Experience Professional!
Like all mature professions, customer experience has a certification that is internationally recognized. Adding it to your resume will signal to the business community that you are serious about customer experience and your aspiration to be part of its leadership ranks…
Why Bt2B Businesses Must Think Like B2C in the Next Decade
B2B vs B2B thinking makes a real difference when it comes to customer experience. According to Gartner at least 80% of B2B buyers now expect the same buying experience as B2C customers in 2019. Gone are the days when B2B organizations did not need to…
Customer Experience, Self Service, and the Gift of Time
Time is the most precious gift in life. If you think about it, time is the one thing we all want more of. As we get older and busier, time gets even more valuable to us.
Are You Thinking Strategically?
Today, we are elevating our conversation to thinking strategically. The Petrova Experience is in the strategy creation business. So, we frequently encounter the difficulty businesses have anticipating, let alone defining, the tangible outcomes of a strategy engagement. Before the start of the engagement stakeholders want…
Is AI Really The Answer?
Earlier this week we shared some of the pitfalls of implementing self-service and highlighted the importance of strategic and empathetic implementation. AI (artificial intelligence) is one of the self-service tools in the customer service professional toolbox today. It is also one of the new buzzwords,…
Why you need a defined culture for customer experience?
When designed and built correctly, customer experience expresses an organization’s brand. Your brand and marketing promises serve as a guiding light to your experience team. Similarly, organizational culture serves as a goalpost for the service side of customer experience.
Customer Experience Tips and Best Practices In 2017?
This is Post 2 of Liliana Petrova’s series on customer experience. She shares customer experience tips, lessons learned, and best practices for the new year. And dives into organizational culture and other customer experience building blocks for brands. In the JetBlue blog article, Ms. Petrova…
Patient Experience Trends in 2021 – Telehealth is Here to Stay
Today, we continue our series about 2021 Customer Experience trends and tactics. We take a closer look at patient experience and what telehealth means for the future. Both for patients and providers. As we look at lessons learned last year, one thing is abundantly clear….
How to Overcome Hospitality Industry Challenges by Empowering Employees
If you are a hospitality industry leader, or a leader in another business sector who has been reading about the industry, you have encountered some grim statistics. It is true. The hospitality industry faces real challenges. By extension, guests face potentially fractured experiences that contradict…
Why I Don’t Love Chatbots
Today, we tackle the value proposition that chatbots are more valuable to companies than customers. I reject this. The ROI simply is not there, especially since better customer experience is not there. I have experienced both fully automated bots and “augmented” service agents interactions using…
How Southwest Can Own Customer Experience Again
The collapse of the Southwest passenger experience this holiday season is an unlikely jumping off point for a conversation on how to own customer experience transformation. Unfortunately, it is not a surprising trigger for this conversation. Now, Wall Street analysts will be much more open…
3 Cost Conscious Mistakes in Hospitality Implementation that Lose Money
Hospitality is a cornerstone of customer experience in travel, healthcare, and across industries. There is no question that hospitality is essential for creating world class, seamless experiences and driving customer loyalty. However, when it comes time to cut costs, it is often where businesses start….
United CEO does not care about #customers happiness. Really?
Lately, I have been thinking about United Airlines and its organizational culture. Initially, I thought about United Airlines culture because someone asked whether it is possible to build a customer-centric culture in a company that is NOT founded with the customer at the center. In…
Healthcare Experience Horror Story
We talk about good vs bad customer experiences. And we give examples of organizations that do things well or poorly. But we rarely are able to shine the light on a truly horrific experience. We found one in our latest healthcare experience. Complexity is Not…
Customer Understanding for Airport Customer Experience: Theory vs Practice
One of the (many!) interesting things about working in airport customer experience for as long as our team has, is watching how the language around customer experience changes as ideas about how to centralize passenger needs and expectations evolve. Trade association Airports Council International (ACI),…
How to Prepare for AI: Dispatches from CR Summit, Charleston
On the eve of the #CRSummit in Charleston, customer experience leaders from various industries held the first AI Committee meeting. AI is a challenging topic to cover because it has varied customer experience applications, depending on a brand’s growth cycle, customer base and business challenges….
Why Millennial Investors are Abandoning You
It’s time to talk about the Millennial investor, a critical market for financial services firms in the next five years. For the past decade, the media talked about the impact of Millennials in the workforce, changing purchasing behaviors, and culture shifts. What we don’t see…
NPS Best Practices
Last week I spoke at the Corinium CCO Fall Conference. One of the discussions we had was on the very popular topic of Net Promoter Score best practices and its efficacy to gauge customer satisfaction. We had such great engagement that I want to share…
It’s Time to Meet The Petrova Experience!
Today marks one of the big milestones in my life. This is the day I am officially choosing to live my dream. We are launching The Petrova Experience, a customer experience consulting, coaching and membership organization. I remember the day I fell in love with…
Create Your Tribe: How Great CX Makes a Lifestyle Brand
Newcomers to the market realize that their business is only as strong as the growth of their customer base. With that in mind, senior leaders work hard to shorten the distance between them and the customer.
Airports of the Future: Trends and Innovations
Every year since we founded The Petrova Experience, we write about travel around the holiday season. It has become something of a tradition for us. This year, I will not start by updating you on 2024 holiday season travel numbers. Or how current volume stacks…
Autonomous Customers, Traveler Privacy and More Questions for CX Professionals in a Changing World
“As we move toward a more automated culture, most travelers will adapt to a Jetsonian, automated lifestyle. Every industry we know will be disrupted. For those of us in aviation, this signals the shift from aviation as a service industry to a transactional one that…
Customer Experience Best Practices for 2018?
The JetBlue blog features Liliana Petrova in a new four-part series. The series is on Customer Experience and Customer Experience Innovation. 2017 Lessons Liliana gathers insight from 2017 customer experience lessons learned. Then charts the course for customer experience that delivers technology solutions in new…
Bad Customer Experience
Doing the right thing when things go wrong is not exactly a good business case. But many do it anyway. Why? Because brands want to protect (and grow) their brand equity through human-centered customer experience design of their products and services. In that sense, the…
Web Experience is Having a Comeback
In the third quarter of 2020 US e-commerce sales went up 36.7% compared with the same period in 2019. Websites have come back to center stage. However, we are not seeing an equivalent shift in web experience that matches the shift in today’s consumer behavior. Retailers…
Beyond Customer Satisfaction: 3 Unexpected Ways CX Drives Value
It is time to debunk the nice-to-have myth about customer experience. It is true the discipline operates in the space of perception, feelings, and emotion. What is equally true, but not centralized in budget conversations, is that customer experience has unique, and important, strategic value….
Organizational Culture and Access to Information
By and large, people perceive culture as an HR discipline. The most common perception is that culture covers the soft side of performance. Culture is about how you do things, not so much about what you do. This approach to culture could not be more wrong. In fact, organizational culture is about so much more than a few words in a performance review sheet. It is about leaders expressing values, and the action guidance their cultural behaviors provide.
Autonomous Service Starts at the Top: A CEO To Do List
In a recent article, we explored the controversial news that the customer service agent role as we know it is dead. The AI service agent is taking its place. Granted, this solves multiple problems relating to cost, efficiency, and consistency of customer experience, as we…
Coronavirus Travel: What Does Hospitality Mean Now?
I want to tell you about my recent passenger experience. Earlier this week, I traveled to New Orleans from JFK Terminal 5 in New York. I had planned an airport conference a few months ago. Although many colleagues chose not to travel, I decided to…
Trust Is the Treatment: How to Achieve ROI on Patient Experience through CX Strategy
Patient experience is not a soft metric. It is an engine for financial performance, improved clinical outcomes, and sustained patient loyalty. For hospital executives and family medical practitioners alike, investing in experience is ethically responsible, certainly. It is also fiscally imperative. Patient Experience ROI is…
Customer Experience Design – How Do You Want Customers To Feel?
Last week, we talked about CX Design in terms of space and function. Today, we continue our customer experience design journey to talk about the design of emotions and feelings. All of this adds up to how to deliver great customer experience. The new look of…
Guest Experience: Fusion of Hospitality and Brand Connection through Design
For a customer experience consultant who designs guest experience, and a lover of the customer experience discipline, visiting a new-to-me hotel can go one of two ways. Sometimes, I am struck by CX Fails that disrupt my experience. Other times, I am amazed by the…
How @T4 makes real customer experience impact
Today we share our impressions from visiting our welcoming host Chad at JFK Terminal 4 in NYC. We also celebrate Chad as an effective Customer Experience professional/practitioner. His work is worth sharing on several levels. For those who are given the role of Customer Experience…
2021 Customer Loyalty Strategy – Relationships over Transactions
According to the Salesforce Connected Customer Report, 90% of consumers expect companies to clearly demonstrate their values and 66% expect brands to demonstrate empathy. In other words, when thinking about customer loyalty strategy, you need to understand that customers want you to CARE. Why do…
The Invisible Friction Points Weakening Manufacturer Customer Experience
For years, manufacturers have competed on product quality, operational efficiency, and price. Our current environment of supply chain volatility, talent shortages, and the elevated customer expectations in the “experience economy” means CX is, in many ways, the new QC. Why is customer experience the new…
Lessons Learned at the Forrester Conference: “Data is the New Sexy”
Once a year I look for an event to attend where I can learn something new and get better at what I do. This year, I attended an event hosted by customer experience research organization Forrester – the Forrester Global Council Meeting and the CXNYC2018…
How Does Social Media Affect Customer Experience?
Social Media is the only real-time channel for successful brands to manage customer experience and brand management.
End to End Customer Experience – How to Get it Right
When we think of travel, we often think of the flight experience. But the end to end customer experience is complex, and includes all modes of transportation that get you to and from your destination. Because of this complexity, customers rarely enjoy great end to…
The ROI of Customer Experience Programs
What customer experience is, and how well brands think they are executing customer experience, and how well they are actually doing it are often at odds. According to Bain, 80% of CEOs believe they deliver superior customer experience while, 8% of their customers agree. PatientPop…
5 Things You Can Do to Provide Excellent Passenger Experience in 2022
The Wall Street Journal predicts this Thanksgiving will be among the busiest travel days in decades, with 55 million travelers anticipated to be moving through US airports and other transportation hubs and highways. In fact, “2022 is expected to be the third-busiest year for Thanksgiving…
NYC Subway CX Kills Chivalry in the City
Brands have the power to make customers feel ignored, and even angry. The CX Pyramid crumbles and customer-to-customer behavior, in addition to individual experiences, suffer. Case in point, the New York MTA System.
From Pain Points to Magical Moments: Transform the Customer Experience
Argyle Journal interviewed Liliana Petrova about emerging self service technology and meeting and exceeding customer expectations in airports. One such way, as Liliana explains, is to create magical customer experience moments from customer pain points. Creating these moments starts with intentional customer experience design. Solving…
What is Customer Experience Transformation?
To meet the needs of the empowered 21st Century consumer, most companies, especially larger enterprises, need to embark on a customer experience transformation. Imagine a car manufacturer that does not allow any vehicle customization, or a retail bank with no app-based self-service. Customer experience transformation…
FIFA World Cup, LA Olympics 28, and the Business of Customer Experience
Because we are experience designers (of fan experience transportation hubs and systems), who also happen to be mega-soccer fans, three years before the first ball was kicked at MetLife Stadium, The Petrova Experience keynoted at the New Jersey Travel and Tourism Conference in 2023, talking…
What is Revenge Travel and Why People Do It
LinkedIn is overflowing with articles and company news in response to COVID-19. We are starting to see renderings of future casino experiences that are anything but human-centric. People are beginning to ideate publicly about what would happen if the middle seat on an airplane is…
Holiday Wishes for Great CX: Career Advice Edition
Every successful customer experience initiative starts with a skilled CX team. Brush up on your CX skills to strengthen the business case for CX; to develop relationships within your organization; and to deliver standout customer experiences in the new year.
For Complex Infrastructure Projects, Teaming is All About Timing
According to a 2025 Design-Build Utilization Study, design-build is projected to represent over 47% of US construction spending by 2028, to total more than $1.1 trillion. With projects of this scale and complexity it is critical to identify the sequencing and skills that determine success…
When to Involve Operations in Design-Build Projects: 10 Questions with Theresa Ward
We sat down with Theresa Ward, who brings decades of experience in public and private commercial real estate development, to talk about when and how to leverage operations as a strategic value in design-build projects. And the role of customer experience in cost savings and…
What is Big Data and Why Should I Care?
Big data has become part of our daily language. We read about it. We see companies that are “experts in big data.” LinkedIn is filled with engineers and analysts who are specialists in this area. But what is big data, where did it come from,…
Customer Experience Survey: Why Customers Are Not Responding
When you solicit customer feedback sometimes matters more than how you ask the questions. In the case of a survey about new biometrics boarding initiatives my team and I created for JetBlue, we had a list of feedback that was most important for us.
Interoperability is a Business Risk for Medtech and a Healthcare Risk for Patients
Looking at patient experience and healthcare interoperability in the medtech environment, any observer (customer experience expert or not) recognizes something is broken. A thorough exploration of what is broken exposes fundamental gaps the average observer (including patients) might miss. We know providers face high levels…
What Can Casino Consulting Firms Learn from Airlines?
Today we’re talking about casino experience. Casinos and airlines are similar in their operational complexity and sense of wonder. They also are similar in the way they can implement technology to improve their guest experience design. For some reason though, Las Vegas still has not…
What is Telemedicine? Keeping Medicine at the Heart
Guest Post by Dr. Melynda Barnes for The Petrova Experience. In this post Dr. Barnes answers the question “what is telemedicine,” and reminds us to keep medicine at the heart of telemedicine. For years, I trained and worked as an ENT and surgeon at institutions…
Am I A Good Candidate For A Customer Experience Role?
People often ask me what experience they need to be a good fit for customer experience roles.
Digital Customer Experience Strategy – Top Three Mistakes
How many of you have interacted with financial and insurance institutions who seem to have forgotten the invention of the world wide web and applications design? In 2021, Major players like Oppenheimer, TD Bank, and almost every big insurance company on the S&P 500 offer…
What is Wayfinding?
I did not always know what wayfinding means. But ever since I left Bulgaria to come to America I have been looking to find my way. The first time I heard the term “wayfinding” was in JetBlue Airways when I worked on the fusion design…
How Smart Do Humans Want AI To Get?
Earlier, we covered the basics of AI and what it is in theory. Today, we talk more about existing practical applications of AI and more examples of artificial intelligence. And we reflect on what that means to the customer experience field. We also share some…
The seamless travel experience we deserve
This week on the CES 2020 main stage Delta’s CEO Ed Bastian presented a vision about the future of seamless travel experience that “might happen in just a few years.” Many of us have been working towards this vision for the last 5 years. In…
Diversity is more than difference of color
Yesterday I had the privilege to join a panel on how to develop diversity and inclusion on your teams at Developer Week in Brooklyn. I was really excited to learn that diversity made it onto the event agenda. The panel was made of 5 women…
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of [Customer] Happiness
Seven years ago, when we launched The Petrova Experience, the 250th Anniversary of the founding of the United States felt far away. However, its founding principles, particularly the pursuit of happiness, felt immediate and relevant. So much so that when we came up with our…
United Airlines Culture Problem
I am often asked what organizational culture is. Frequently, I meet with executives who are feeling defeated by the scale and complexity of leading cultural transformations. So, where do you begin with cultural transformation? And as someone invested in organizational culture and leadership, how do…
Culture Starts at the Top
Without a leader who believes that today’s business success is about acquiring and retaining customers, you cannot even begin the process of building a culture. Leaders who are passionate about the customer are also passionate about creating culture and employee engagement.
What Holiday Parties Teach about Hospitality
Last week The Petrova Experience, like many companies, hosted our holiday party. In good customer experience fashion, we put significant effort into finding the perfect location. We agonized over the details of choosing the perfect food. And we made it an imperative to find a…
Grateful for Customer Experience Heroes
When we launched The Petrova Experience, we did so with the words “in pursuit of customer happiness.” Pursuit of happiness is part of every interaction we have with our clients, partners and colleagues. And it is embedded in our organizational culture. For this reason and…
When Not To Invest In Self-Service Technology?
What is self-service? It is something every progressive brand aspires to have more of. Few implement it successfully. Self-service is a new tool to optimize a company’s workforce by removing transactions from the system. All industries are looking at it as a strategy of the…
WeWork Does Customer Experience Right with a Wow Moment
Used at the right time and place along the customer’s journey, the Wow Moment is an excellent retention technique. When a brand creates personal, relevant experience at exactly the right time, it can build a lifelong, loyal customer relationship.
The Risk No Insurer Prices: Why Customer Experience is Costing Insurance Companies Renewals
Insurers are experts in pricing physical and actuarial risk. What too few have learned to price effectively is the slow, compounding erosion that comes from fragmented customer service. What is the real cost of the customer who receives different answers from different channels? Or agents…
Center of Excellence: The Antidote to Failed Customer Experience Programs
It’s no secret that even good CX programs fail. Back in 2018, Bob Thompson of CustomerThink shared the “inconvenient truth” that “93% of customer experience programs are failing.” Gartner echoed this two years ago. It found “most Customer Experience Programs are not delivering on the…
How to Build Customer-Centric Culture
Before we address how to build customer-centric culture, let’s examine the terminology: what culture is and what it is not. Culture is not executives talking about high level strategy. Equally, it is not your Brand Book. The language surrounding business strategy and brand management assumes…
Customer Facing Experience: Communication and Hospitality
Today, we are talking about communication as part of the customer facing experience. This is one of the most misused and misinterpreted notions both in our professional lives and our personal lives. How many times has your partner, a brand, or your leadership told you…
What the United JetBlue Partnership Signals for Passenger Experience and Airline Revenue Optimization
Last week I had the pleasure of seeing United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby at the WSJ Future of Everything Festival. And to hear from him about the just-announced United JetBlue partnership that will bring United back to JFK in 2027. First, and most importantly, don’t…