Customer satisfaction was dropping like a rock as complaints began to flood in. The reason? The wait times at baggage claim were too long.

Faced with the flood of complaints, executives chose a completely logical response.

They increased the amount of baggage handlers and were able to get the average wait time down to 8 minutes.

But the complaints kept coming.

They decided to take a closer look and see where the issue was.

They saw that on average, passengers were able to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim in about 1 minute and would wait for their luggage for the remaining 7.

So the airport tried something both incredibly simple and completely counter intuitive. They moved the arrival gates farther away from the terminal and travelers had to walk 6 times farther.

With this change, they flipped the ratio of occupied time vs. unoccupied time, which is a great concept and the article by the NY Times and the presentation by Mustafa Kurtuldu do a great job explaining.

I want to focus on something a little bit different.

When looking for solutions to customers’ pain points, it’s perfectly valid to consider the most logical paths forward as the airport execs first did.

The market will have a lot of these solutions for your customers.

For brands that truly want to stand out, look for unique, innovative, and valid solutions that serve a specific set of customers. That’s where the market share is.

Brands like Brompton Bicycles, Poo-pouri.

And Houston Airport? Customer complaints dropped to nearly 0.

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