CX Chat 015 brings Martin Henley back together with Prof. Hany Mokhtar, the CX Master of the GCC, for a raw, unfiltered conversation about the crisis in modern customer experience, and whether we’ve reached the point where businesses have lost their humanity* in pursuit of operational efficiency, revenue extraction, and cost optimisation.
This episode confronts the uncomfortable reality that air travel has devolved from the most exciting experience to herding people around the planet with as little respect and dignity as possible, and asks the existential questions: are we too late to save customer experience? And have we lost our humanity?
You’ll hear:
 Why loyalty programs have become opportunities to kick customers in the teeth because airlines know when you buy chocolate in their stores but won’t credit hundreds of hours you’ve spent on their planes, and the program designed to hook customers becomes a weapon to disappoint them
 Why budget airlines are actually hidden cost airlines because you select them based on price, then discover you must pay for seats that are mandatory, can’t charge your own devices, can’t drink your own water, and are held captive while being told every 20 minutes what you’re not allowed to do
 Why the snake queue at Dubai Airport forces passengers to walk 250 meters to travel 10 meters and how staff stand there watching elderly passengers, people with motion sickness, and parents carrying children walk five times further than necessary because nobody opens the barriers
 Why check in machines with dirty touch screens that don’t work and rude staff who threaten to call police reveal the ultimate failure of humanity because two people under stress, both ready for a fight, have lost the ability to say good morning, how are you, let me help
 Why it’s worse than lack of resources because businesses have established a culture of fear where frontline employees are better off lying, threatening, or getting rid of customers than escalating issues, because nobody ever goes to their boss and nothing ever gets resolved
 Why customer experience is custodianship manifested in ownership and if operational teams don’t own customer issues, they have ownership of fear, egocentricity, or panopticism instead, and no one is worried about the customer
 The story of Akbar Al Baker, CEO of Qatar Airways, who rides the plane like any other passenger* without identifying himself, experiences the journey, and returns to the office with findings about what customers are actually living
 Why businesses innovate workshops about AI integration while forgetting the basics because you have a crack in the plane and it’s in the air, and you’re telling me how to decorate the plane from outside, when the real issue is you’re not meeting safety, dignity, or alignment
 Why safety is weaponized against dignity because businesses take the base expectation of safety and use it to overrule the second level expectation of being treated with respect, deciding on behalf of customers as if they don’t know what’s best for them
 The story of the call center agent in Bangalore who spent 50 minutes unable to help because IT security locked the internet, and he was answering from outdated printed materials, proving that employee enablement is the foundation of customer experience
 Why brakes are not constraints, they’re made for safety and control and businesses driven by fear of losing, missing out, or having data breaches cannot deliver customer experience because they’re riding the fastest horse with no control
 Why it’s not too late because the main thing is to keep customer experience the main thing, and rehabilitation, education, and empowerment of boards, CEOs, HR, IT, and operational teams can fix the compass and restore humanity for the sake of better business
Martin Henley
Programme director
Martin is on a mission to connect, empower, and motivate CX leaders to build better businesses.
Through this CX blog he brings together experienced CX thinkers, business leaders, and frontline insights to make customer-centricity easier to understand and apply.
If you are interested to appear on the blog or have a conversation about how CX could be improving your business, please schedule a time here.
