Share article
Kristýna Komsa is currently on maternity leave, but before starting this new chapter in her life she worked as a Manager at Prague Airport, where she was responsible for the overall customer experience strategy, feedback collection, passenger segmentation, customer journey mapping and setting service quality standards. She led a team of CX specialists, analysts and researchers.
Her career didn’t start in a call centre or customer service department, though. She worked in marketing at Seznam.cz, coordinated language teaching and did research. She studied at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University, and it was this blend of analytical thinking and creative practice that eventually led her to exactly the place where both make the most sense: customer experience in an environment where hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world pass through every day.
Kristýna, you started your career in marketing at Seznam, then moved into a language school, and finally landed at the airport. That’s not exactly a straight path into CX. How did it all come about, and when did you first realise that customer experience was something you wanted to pursue full-time?
It wasn’t my original plan. I was mostly working in marketing, but I studied at the Institute of Sociological Studies at Charles University, so research has always been close to my heart. I always enjoyed creative work, but I also needed a deeper insight and an analytical foundation to go with it. Thanks to that background, and a fair bit of coincidence, my path at the airport ended up shaping itself into CX.
Customer experience at an airport is complicated because you’re not the only one shaping it dozens of different organisations operate in the same space. How do you set standards in an environment like that, and who actually “owns” the customer experience?
You’re absolutely right. Environments like airports or train stations bring together customers of many different organisations under one roof – from carriers to shops to taxi services. That means you can only directly manage part of the overall journey. To make the end experience as consistent as possible, you first need to be clear on exactly what kind of experience you want to deliver. Ideally, you get the vision and the feelings out of people’s heads and onto paper, and then work with the other players towards a shared goal. In an ideal world, everyone would be after the same thing – a satisfied customer. After all, a customer who has a good experience tells other people about it, buys more, and is far more likely to use the service or product again.
Collecting feedback from passengers sounds simple, until you remember that someone queuing for security probably isn’t in the best of moods. How do you manage to get honest answers at the right moment?
If you want to know someone’s overall impression, you need to let them share it right at the end of their journey. If you’re interested in a specific touchpoint, it’s best to ask immediately after it happens. There’s also the question of what an “honest answer” actually is. Personally, I really enjoy exploring new technologies. Emotion-reading technology, for instance, is one thing that could, in future, help our field get much closer to genuinely honest responses.
You work with customer journey mapping, personas and segmentation. How different is the journey of someone flying for the first time in their life compared with a businessperson who lands every Monday?
It depends what exactly we mean by “businessperson”. Either way, in this respect an airport isn’t that different from a train station. Frequent travellers mostly just want to get from A to B as quickly as possible. They know their way around the space very well, but paradoxically it’s harder to get new information to them, because they’re no longer actively looking for it. Someone who doesn’t travel often, on the other hand, arrives with plenty of time to spare, finds it harder to navigate and tends to be more anxious. For me, there’s another really interesting dimension here too, and that’s the nationality of the traveller.
CX in places like airports, train stations or hospitals is unusual in that customers don’t really have alternatives. Does that change how seriously CX is taken within the organisation?
I think that for enlightened leadership, that shouldn’t make any difference. CX principles go hand in hand with business goals and directly support them. In fact, I’m convinced that CX actually helps money spent on innovation or marketing go further. At the same time, it’s not true that a single CX department can save an entire company on its own. These principles need to be part of the company’s DNA – from how individuals behave day to day, to how processes are set up, to how specific steps are actually carried out. That said, this shouldn’t come across as if CX is something only large corporations can afford. You can experience excellent customer service at a small business or with a local sole trader just as easily.
Looking back at your career in CX, which period or project has shaped the way you think about customer experience the most?
There have been quite a few. An airport environment is so wide-ranging that it lets you get hands-on experience with projects from all sorts of areas – from designing services for parents with children, to toilet design, choosing background music and developing websites, right through to standardising the customer experience, such as staff behaviour and training. Every project has left its mark on me, and together they now make up the whole of how I think about CX. To be honest, though, it’s not just about the projects – I also really love constantly learning and drawing inspiration from other successful companies.
You’ve worked in event marketing, research and product management. Do you find that CX professionals from the “data” world and those from the “creative” world approach customers differently? And who does CX better?
I find that “data people” are, by their very nature, more analytical and focus less on emotions. The creative world, on the other hand, sometimes misses the mark because of too much vision without real foundations or a proper understanding of the data. But the two worlds complement each other brilliantly. That’s why it’s ideal to have a range of different perspectives represented in a team. Everyone brings a different angle to the discussion, which enriches the whole project. Simply put, better CX is delivered by anyone who takes it seriously, rather than treating it as an empty buzzword for a management presentation.
Companies today have CX strategies, NPS scores, customer journey maps. And yet customers sometimes still walk away feeling like nobody listened to them. Where does all that effort get lost along the way?
Honestly, there are still companies out there with no CX strategy, no metrics and no genuine interest in what their customers need. And unfortunately, that shows immediately in the quality of their services. Then there are companies that have everything set up perfectly – but only on paper. Leadership and management aren’t genuinely convinced of the real value CX adds, and that scepticism filters all the way down through the organisation to the customer. In other cases, leadership is enthusiastic, but frontline staff – the real face and voice of the company – let things down. This is often because the rules aren’t clearly defined, or there’s no supervision or the right incentives in place. CX should also be reflected in regular feedback, both in the form of concrete recommendations and financially, through variable pay. In general, CX often overlooks EX – Employee Experience. Another major pitfall is that while we collect huge amounts of data from customers, we often don’t know how to turn it into concrete action. Right from the moment we start collecting data, we need to know exactly what question we’re trying to answer and what we’ll do with the answer once we have it.
Imagine you’re sitting having coffee with your grandmother and she asks what you actually do for a living. “Customer Experience” won’t mean much to her. How would you explain what you do all day and why it matters?
CX, or customer experience, is essentially about the feelings a person has when they come into contact with a company – from the very first impression to the very last interaction.
Our job is to understand who our customer is, how they behave, what they need and what they expect. We then bring these insights into the company as the voice of the customer, and help shape services, processes and communication so that every interaction is as pleasant and as simple as possible.
When we find something isn’t working well, we suggest specific improvements, test them, and evaluate whether they actually work. Through this lens, I make sure that the customer has the best possible experience throughout their entire journey, doesn’t run into unnecessary obstacles, and isn’t left disappointed.
The goal is for people to be able to rely on us, and to be confident that we, as a company, live up to the trust they place in us with their time and money. Ideally, so that they don’t just use us again, but recommend us to others with genuine enthusiasm.
And to finish off with a classic: do you have a CX story, either from your own work or as a customer, that has stuck with you and that you enjoy telling?
The best moments are always created by individual employees who go above and beyond their job description. That’s why it’s so important to look for people on the team who have a natural talent for working with people and who share the company’s values. One strong story has stuck with me, unfortunately a negative one. An employee at a company I’d ordered goods from called me and was extremely rude to me. Since I wasn’t aware of having made any mistake on my end, it really caught me off guard. The whole situation was absurd and unprofessional. It showed the flip side of CX – an unhappy customer tells many other potential customers about their experience.
On the positive side, I like to mention how well Starbucks has set up its staff’s authority. When a problem comes up, staff have the power to resolve it on the spot, immediately. I also really admire Rohlik.cz’s customer-first approach to handling complaints. Another great example is the Orea hotel chain and its products and services for families with children. But what I especially like to spread the word about is encouraging customers to give feedback – both when they’re happy, and when they haven’t received the quality they paid for. Politely, of course.
