I love to experience innovative things. Recently, I parked my car at the William P. Hobby Airport in Houston, and was pleased to see they had installed indicator lights for each parking space.
Their goal for the indicator lights is to enable drivers to look down a row of parking spaces and just watch for the green lights, which indicate an open parking space. As anyone who has searched up and down the rows at an airport parking garage can tell you, this is a huge time saver.
So today, I drove into the parking garage and looked down the first aisle. All red. The next aisle showed one green, about two-thirds of the way down. When I reached it, though, there was a car in that space. But the light was green! Hmmmm, a glitch, perhaps? Except the next two green lights also had cars in their spaces. It was the fourth green light before I got a free space.
Now, at the end of the day, this was not that big of a deal. So it took me two extra minutes to find a parking space? The point is, if you are going to offer a better customer experience, you should get it right.
Turns out, the problem has a lot to do with the technology being used. New systems that use ultrasonic detection are 99.9% correct. But that is expensive technology, something like $500 per space. Think about how many spaces there are at your airport carpark, and you can see how that would add up quick.
Another technology is induction loop sensing, which works essentially like a metal detector. If there is a small car, not parked just so, it may not trigger the sensor. Regardless of why the sensor is not working, though, it is frustrating to drive to a space with a green light and find it not empty. It negates the value of the innovation and turns what should be a great leap forward in the customer experience into a negative.
Think about the innovations you are prepared to roll out. How have you vetted them to make sure they will have the desired positive impact on the customer experience? Keep thinking about how you can deploy new technologies, but if you learn there are some rough edges, then smooth those out before implementing the technology.