A Willy Wonka inspired children’s event went viral last week after outraged parents called the police to complain about the ineptitude of the experience.
Described as an opportunity to “indulge in a chocolate fantasy like never before”, the event – based on Roald Dahl’s classic children’s book and the recent blockbuster starring Timothée Chalamet – failed to live up to expectations.
After paying up to £35 a ticket, attendees were promised an “enchanted garden”, an “imagination lab”, and a “twilight tunnel”.
Unfortunately, the reality was a small bouncy castle and a handful of plastic props scattered around a mostly bare warehouse in a Glasgow industrial estate, with the only thing approaching a “chocolate fantasy” being some jellybeans and lemonade.
With customers understandably upset and angry, the police were called, and organizers closed down the event after only being open for a few hours.
Common CX Pitfalls in an Uncommon Setting
While the entire series of events has proven to be a source of amusement across social media, the failures of Willy’s Chocolate Experience outline some of the common shortcomings that many customer experience teams struggle with – albeit in an exaggerated, and almost fantastical, fashion.
So, where did it all go wrong for the Wonka Experience? And how can CX teams ensure they don’t make similar mistakes?
Overpromising and Underdelivering
Let’s start with the obvious. The reason that the Wonka event was such a disaster and has gained such notoriety, is the fact that it failed to provide customers with the experience that it had advertised.
Although most CX teams won’t need to concern themselves with the amount of chocolate they have in stock, or whether they have hired an adequate number of Oompa-Loompas – the point remains the same: if you promise a customer something, you need to deliver it.
In their book, ‘Ridiculously Simple Customer Experience: How to Quickly Build and Maintain a CX Juggernaut’, Steve and Conner Stauning describe overpromising as the “most avoidable driver of bad customer experiences.”
By overpromising, even in a small or apparently harmless way like assuring a customer of a delivery date that can’t be guaranteed, agents are creating misaligned expectations, which are almost certain to lead to poor CX.
For Steve and Conner, one of the key drivers of overpromising is a desire for agents to please the customer, at the expense of being 100% truthful:
Whether the employee believes that’s what the customer wants to hear, they have a desire to be liked or accepted, they think this solves everything (for now), or all the above, breaking your frontline employees out of this habit is critical.
While being upfront with your customers may involve having to deliver bad news and cause some initial CX discomfort, managing expectations and building a reputation as being trustworthy will strengthen the long-term health of your customer experience program.
The importance of customer trust was recently outlined in the UK Customer Satisfaction Index January 2024 report.
The findings revealed a direct correlation between trust and customer satisfaction – with 82.5% of customers who reported a high level of customer satisfaction with a company, also reporting high levels of trust.
The report emphasized how trust can also be a powerful tool in proving the ROI of a CX team:
“Customers with strong levels of trust in an organization are likely to be more receptive to new products and services.”
Over-Reliance on AI
As the Wonka Experience story began to unravel, one of the more interesting aspects was the creator’s use of artificial intelligence.
The AI images that are present across the event’s website depict a fantastical sweet-filled woodland, with lollipop trees, enormous caches of sweet treats, and a cascading waterfall filled with giant jellybeans.
While the parents and children who attended the event would not have been expecting anything as elaborate as the AI scene, it was still clearly not remotely representative of the sparsely decorated warehouse that they visited.