I flew Delta Air Lines a few months ago and was pleasantly surprised by the before-flight safety video. Instead of the standard sleep-inducing safety presentation, Delta presented a safety video that blended the necessary safety information with a variety of humorous visuals.

In some senses, the video represents a gutsy move. Airline safety is not a topic ripe for humorous treatment — particularly for people about to fly.

However, Delta created a carefully-constructed video that strikes just the right balance between humor and content.

Delta Customer Service in the News

Back in August 2012, we wrote about the American Customer Satisfaction Index rankings for airlines. At the time, Delta was ranked around the middle of the pack.

Personally, I’ve always had a soft-spot for Delta. I have a friend who is a pilot and a colleague who is a flight attendant, so I am happy to see that Delta is taking its game to a new level.

Delta has been in the news twice in the past few weeks for two instances of Hero-Class^TM Customer Service.

Check out these stories about the CEO of Delta giving up his seat for a mother picking up her daughter or this story about an American traveler who lost her passport while in France (h/t to Chase Clemons of SupportOps for the link).

And while anecdotal stories are not the best way to measure a company’s customer experience, these stories do support what seems to be an enhanced focus on customer experience — as evidenced by Delta’s creative safety video.

Controlling the Customer Experience When You Can

One of the things, I like about Delta’s safety video is that it is an out-of-the-box move to maximize the customer experience in an area where the company is severely limited with options.

So much of the experience of flying is beyond the control of the airlines — security, regulation, and air traffic control, to name a few — that the airlines are hard pressed to find ways to create unique and memorable customer experiences that differentiate their service from others.

I will just repeat what I said to Michelle Quillin of New England Multimedia in the comments of a previous post on airline customer service:

So many of those things are not changeable through customer service initiatives that the airlines really have a few narrow gaps to make the customer experience better. I truly believe they can improve them, in fact I think there are opportunities to WOW customers throughout the process. The question is can they deliver at that level consistently enough to offset the basic process, and to override price and schedule.

In an industry that has been heavily commoditized, Delta deserves great credit for finding one of those narrow gaps and using creativity to improve the customer experience.

So, check out the video below. What do you think?

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PS. Here is a link to the first version of this video.