Can mistakes strengthen brand loyalty for airlines? The power of service recovery design

Yes, handled well, failure builds loyalty rather than eroding it. Service recovery is the real stress test of a brand: disruption is inevitable in aviation, and how a brand shows up in that moment can outweigh a hundred touchpoints that went right. Designing deliberately for the "rainy day," not just the seamless blue-sky journey, is one of the most powerful tools for building lasting customer trust.

NewTerritory is a London brand experience design studio specialising in aviation, hospitality, rail and automotive. In this episode of In Conversation, Associate Creative Director Jerome Nelet is joined by Brandi Wyche, General Manager of CX Strategy and Design at Delta Air Lines.

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10 KEY TAKEAWAYS

1. Design for failure, not just success. Mapping every scenario where things can go wrong is what makes genuine recovery possible - and recovery is where trust is actually built.
2. Disruption is the real stress test of a brand. Beautifully designed dining, lighting and tone can all fall flat the moment a customer's core goal, getting from A to B, is threatened.
3. Customers lose control, not just time. A delay turns an independent traveller into someone dependent on the brand for information and transparency. Returning a sense of agency matters as much as fixing the logistics.
4. The same delay means different things to different people. Treating customers as a monolith fails; a 30-minute delay carries entirely different weight depending on who the traveller is and what they need.
5. Recovery is interaction, not transaction. It requires empathy and context about who the customer is - delivered at scale, which is the central design challenge.
6. Two-way communication beats pushed solutions. Delta starts with automation and self-service for efficiency, but lets customers signal that the automated answer isn't right for them, then works to the better solve.
7. The recovery ecosystem must flex with severity. A small disruption stretches the system slightly; a major one requires it to stretch across many customers with competing needs simultaneously.
8. The "duck" principle. Customers should see smooth, calm gliding; the complexity churns beneath the surface. Design is what makes that translation possible.
9. Design bridges operational complexity and human simplicity. Without it, a disruption becomes a chaotic experience rather than a managed one.
10. One bad moment colours the whole journey. A single severe failure can recolour a hundred positive touchpoints - which is precisely why showing up differently in that moment drives loyalty.

Full transcript

N = Jerome Nelet · BW = Brandi Wyche.

[00:00] — Introduction

BW: For us, it's really important not just to design for when everything goes right. It's really important to design specifically for when things go wrong — because we need to understand exactly all the scenarios where something can go wrong, so that we understand how to actually recover from that experience and make sure our customers have a better recovery from that particular scenario.

JN: This is the real stress test for a brand. You may think about all the experiences that will delight your customers, that will surprise them — but suddenly, when the disruption occurs, all that good work can fall flat.

BW: Utilising design as a tool to understand what I want my customers to experience when there is a disruption —

JN: If I have to remember one thing from this conversation, it's that service recovery is one of the most powerful tools for brands to create long-lasting loyalty.

[01:09] — Designing the rainy day

JN: Hey Brandi. Great to see you.

BW: Great to see you too.

JN: Nice to have you here.

BW: Thank you for having me.

JN: I am so excited to discuss one of the topics we've talked a lot about over the past two years: the opposite of the blue sky — designing the rainy days. We often talk about designing beautiful journeys, seamless experiences, everything flowing nicely. But that's not real life, is it? Especially in your industry — the biggest airline in the world. How do we deal with everything that can go wrong, when we know that it will ultimately go wrong one day or another?

BW: I think you're spot on. Ultimately, at some point, it will go wrong in aviation. It is one of the most complex industries. If you think about the number of flights we fly on a daily basis, the number of customers we take from point A to their destination, the bags, the food, the cleanliness of the aircraft — there's just a lot to think about when it comes to delivering the right experience.

So for us it's really important not just to design for when everything goes right. It's really important to design specifically for when things go wrong, because we need to understand exactly all the scenarios where something can go wrong, so that we understand how to actually recover from that experience and make sure our customers have a better recovery from that particular scenario.

It's really important for us to think about how we're building trust with our customers. And to build trust, that really takes intentionality. So we have to be intentional about what we're building and what experience we want to deliver — both from a human aspect and from a technology aspect. That's why we're very thoughtful about designing for the rainy day experience, in addition to our end-to-end blue sky journey.

JN: This is the real stress test for a brand. You may think about all the experiences that will delight your customers, that will surprise them. You create beautiful dining scenarios, think about the lighting, think about the tone of the experiences — but suddenly, when the disruption occurs, all that good work can fall flat. Because ultimately what matters to the customer was the ultimate goal, wasn't it: going from A to B. Suddenly this composite experience, made of a lot of things that were thought through, becomes one, and the big focus is now: I'm not getting to where I'm supposed to go.

So how do we deal with this tension between the aspiration of a beautiful, seamless journey, and the ultimate moment we know will happen — where one of those composite parts fails and is disrupted by events we sometimes can't control, like weather, a strike, or something operational?

BW: We want to build an experience where customers have the best journey they can possibly have. We like to say we want to make the journey part of the joy for our customers. So it's not just about the end destination, it's about the experience they have getting there. But to your point, sometimes that can go wrong. If you think about weather, which unfortunately we cannot control — sometimes there are mechanical delays, which are important, because we want to make sure safety is the most important component of getting our customers from point A to point B. So sometimes those disruptions do happen.

We're not just designing for the onboard experience or the airport experience. We're also designing for what happens when something goes wrong. What happens when weather delays that customer? How do we interact with that customer based on who they are, and what's important to them? We really try to think about this not from having our customers be a monolith, but from understanding who they are and what their particular needs are in this particular situation. For example, a 30-minute delay for one customer may mean something entirely different than a 30-minute delay for another.

[05:54] — Losing control, not just time

JN: There's also this notion that time has a different value when I'm disrupted in my journey. I not only lose time, I lose a sense of control. Every customer comes with their background, their motivation, a sense of urgency. When they lose that agency in their travel, they go from being a very independent traveller to suddenly becoming dependent on the brand — dependent on the information they're given, dependent on the transparency we choose to give them. How do you manage that balance of giving information to the customer without overwhelming them?

BW: You're absolutely right. When we think about how we're interacting with customers, it's really important to make sure we're giving them the right context of information in that moment, delivering that information at the right time, and also giving information that helps guide them to the next best decision they can make for themselves. Because to your point, that's ultimately what customers are looking for. They want a bit more of that agency back when they don't feel like they're in control. Being able to give some of that agency back is actually going to help them feel a little better in that moment, and have a better perception of their experience.

JN: It's not about transaction anymore — this is interaction.

BW: That's right.

JN: I need to support you. I'm here. I'm having empathy. I know your background, I know where you're coming from. That requires a lot of capability, which is really hard to develop at scale. How do we come up with systems that deal with that level of intelligence at brand level?

BW: It's about the way we show up in the moment. It's about the way we speak to our customers via digital mechanisms in that moment. And it's about how we understand who that customer is — to understand that not every customer wants to be recovered in the same way. Being able to have two-way communication, where we can actually capture and understand how this customer wants to be recovered, helps us build a better experience than just pushing an experience onto a customer. It's about actually understanding who that customer is, what they're looking for, and delivering the right experience for them in that particular moment.

JN: Which is a huge challenge at scale. How do we comprehend the motivation of one person, which may differ very much from the assumption we have? Someone may change their mind because of the storm — they may defer their decision to go to Seattle and instead go to Tampa, spend some time with their grandparents. How do we embed this level of complexity at system level and at design level?

[09:01] — Automation, self-service and two-way communication

BW: We try to start with as much automation and self-service as we possibly can, because we understand that during those moments customers want agency, but they're also looking for efficiency. But we also create two-way communication with that customer. So if that automated response is not the right response for them, we allow them to reach back out to us and say: I'm actually looking for something different. Once they let us know, we can work with that customer to find the best solve for them in that particular moment.

That allows us both to be efficient — capturing as many customers through automation and self-service as we possibly can — and to create a unique exchange with those customers for whom that first response wasn't necessarily the right one. It creates the two-way communication so we can find the right recovery for that particular customer. It allows us to build an ecosystem that delivers the right experience, but also gives them more agency and more control over what they're actually going to get out of that disruption.

JN: Would you say that this ecosystem flexes and changes and morphs when a disruption occurs? Is this where designing the rainy day is actually designing how the organisation as a whole changes and articulates itself differently?

BW: That ecosystem not only changes and flexes with a disruption, it changes and flexes with the severity of that disruption. The bigger the disruption, the more that ecosystem has to stretch to be able to get to the right solve for multiple customers in a particular situation. A small disruption may stretch that ecosystem a little bit. But in a larger disruption, that ecosystem has to make sure we are encapsulating all of those different customers, with different needs and different circumstances, and making sure we can get them to the final destination they want to reach.

[11:13] — Complexity beneath the surface: the duck principle

JN: What you said there is the reason I find service recovery absolutely fascinating. On one hand there's all this organicity and flexibility and urgency that changes how an organisation such as Delta morphs and scales — bringing complexity to its highest level. And on the other, we need to simplify the information for customers down to the bare minimum, so they feel confident and not overwhelmed by the complexity being created all around them. There's this interesting duality. How do we deal with that at scale?

BW: I like to think of it as a duck. If you think about a duck swimming on the water, it looks smooth. It looks like there's not a lot going on — that's what we want our customers to see, so they build trust. But underneath that water, we are moving, we are shaking, we are making things go. That is essentially the complexity of the aviation industry. We have to make sure we're building the right systems under the water, but at the same time creating an experience — even in a disruption — so that customers look at us and say: I know I'm okay. Because they see us gliding across that water, and everything's going to be fine.

JN: This is a lovely notion. I think it really sensitises the role of design — where design is the bridge between the complexity of operation and the desire for a simpler, more human interaction in a moment of heightened stress.

BW: That's absolutely right, because without design we can't make that translation. It becomes a chaotic experience. But utilising design as a tool to understand what I want my customers to experience when there is a disruption — this is not just about designing the perfect experience. It's about being intentional about designing for when things do go wrong, and how we as a brand want to show up for our customers when things go wrong.

[13:29] — What matters most in recovery

BW: If I think about what we've talked about today, and the touchpoints we're really trying to design for, a couple of big things come to mind. The first is how we actually communicate with customers during a disruption. It's one of the key and crucial points customers are looking for from us. Being able to give the right context at the right time, to help customers feel like they have a bit more agency during that time, is really important.

But not only that — it's really about thinking about the whole end-to-end experience for that customer. Because a customer can have a hundred touchpoints with us in their journey. If they have one particular moment that's severe and goes wrong, it can colour everything they see about their entire journey with us. We want to make sure that if we show up differently in that one particular moment, we're going to create a perception for that customer that yes, it didn't go all the way right — but it wasn't quite as bad as it could have been. And that's why I want to stay loyal to that brand.

JN: Absolutely. If I have to remember one thing from this conversation, it's that service recovery is one of the most powerful tools for brands to create long-lasting loyalty, and to truly transform the experience in the moments that matter most to our customers.

BW: Showing up when they needed us the most. That is unparalleled trust. And it's why I do what I do.

JN: Brandi, so lovely to talk to you again, as always.

BW: As always. You as well. Thank you so much, Jerome.

FAQS

What is service recovery design? Service recovery design is the deliberate design of what happens when a customer journey goes wrong — mapping failure scenarios in advance and designing the communication, systems and human response that follow. NewTerritory, a London aviation and hospitality experience design studio, treats it as the true stress test of a brand experience.

Can a service failure actually improve customer loyalty? Yes. When a brand shows up well in a moment of disruption, it can build deeper trust than a flawless journey would. As Delta Air Lines' Brandi Wyche describes it, a single severe failure can colour a customer's view of a hundred other touchpoints — so handling that moment differently is what drives long-term loyalty.

How do airlines design for flight delays and disruption? By designing for the "rainy day" alongside the ideal journey: anticipating failure scenarios, giving customers the right information at the right time to restore a sense of agency, and building recovery ecosystems that flex with the severity of the disruption. Delta combines automation and self-service with two-way communication so customers can signal when the default solution isn't right for them.

Why does a delay affect customers differently? Because customers aren't a monolith. A 30-minute delay means something entirely different depending on the traveller's context, urgency and purpose. Disruption also removes a sense of control, turning an independent traveller into someone dependent on the brand for information — so recovery is as much about restoring agency as about logistics.

What role does design play in operational complexity? Design is the bridge between operational complexity and simple, human interaction. Without it, disruption becomes a chaotic customer experience. Brandi Wyche describes the goal as the duck principle: calm and smooth on the surface for the customer, while significant complexity is managed beneath.

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