3.2 What Happens Next: Why Communication Is Part of the Service

Twenty minutes after we landed in Copenhagen, I got a notification: our next flight was cancelled. That was all it said. The airline, SAS, found us a new flight and looked after us for the night. What we could not get was the answer to one question: what happens next? I use that trip as a case to look at the day a service breaks. I go through three moments (a notification, a customer service window and a suitcase) and put them next to an idea from Jan Carlzon, who ran SAS in the 1980s. He called every short contact between an employee and a customer a moment of truth, and he said the employee in it needs two things: to know what is true, and to be allowed to act on it. In this episode: • Why information that already exists inside an organization often does not reach the person it is about • Three things to try: draw the broken day as its own service, check each moment for "know" and "act", and count the questions people ask after something breaks • What an AI agent at the service desk would and would not have changed • Why sharing what you know is how a service earns trust Mentioned: Jan Carlzon, Moments of Truth (1987). John Seddon on failure demand. Behave & Design explores behavioral science, service design and systems thinking.