Lessons of poor airline customer service

A few days ago we had a class with Enrique Dans where he told us about an “episode” he had with Air Europa. To make a long story short, Prof. Dans wrote a post on his blog in January 2006, an "open letter" to Air Europa's president, after a truly terrible customer service experience with the airline. To this day, more than 5 years later, he has not received an answer - needless to say a compensation - from Air Europa. What he accomplished was to get his post linked and commented by hundreds of people. He was featured in multiple press articles, all which contributed to him generating awareness of this of this issue. I would say he helped to "pave the way" for what would come later: social media as powerful tool to "fight" against poor customer service.

Hearing Prof. Dans' story in class and then further reading about it online made me remember another issue of this sort: Dave Carrol, a Canadian musician who was also mistreated by an airline, this case United Airlines. Carrol did not write a blog post; he created a song & video and posted it on YouTube in 2009. The video pretty much speaks for itself:

Mr. Carrol made 3 songs in total to protest against United. He didn't stop there, as he basically created a social media campaign against United's bad treatment that achieved millions of comments and views. Today, Carrol is founder and leader of Big Break Solutions, a company that offers solutions to improve customer service and therefore people's experiences.

These two stories of poor customer relationship are not the only ones. But the point here is: how in the world did these companies not realize the importance of customer service? I would say it is because, even though they get all the negative coverage they do, they still seem to operate perfectly well and gain as much profits as they did before the protests. What I think they do not realize is how, in time, they will start to be affected by the increasing reach of their customer's voices that is empowered through the growth of social media.

Companies need to increasingly pay attention to their customers critiques, suggestions and complaints because their biggest asset is the brand experience that they offer, which basically translates into customer loyalty. Also, in order to keep their customers anxiety-free and therefore loyal to the brand, companies need to provide an answer, even if that answer is "I don't have an answer to your question" or "We are working to solve your problem". Nothing frustrates a customer more than feeling ignored, which in turn generates actions like the ones of Prof. Dans and Mr. Carrol.

In these two cases, both airlines should have provided an answer, even to just accept their mistake and then say "We are sorry for your inconveniences". They should have realized that, regardless of the power that Dans and Carrol have, they are customers that will never use their services again. Secondly, they should have thanked the customers for showing the mistake and giving them the chance to become better airlines. Third, they should have offered concrete compensation as a promise of "improvement": Dans should have been offered free business class tickets for future flights and Carrol should have been paid fully for this broken guitar. Going further, both companies should have implemented some sort of crisis management program when the issues grew, and immediately incorporated customer service improvement programs into their management. A smart move would have been to turn the crises into opportunities to become better, more customer-satisfying companies by doing just that: incorporating improvement programs and then massively communicating them to turn their negative publicity around. 

To conclude on a positive note, there are companies that know how to pay attention to their customers and are currently applying best practices to enhance brand loyalty. KLM is an airline that that has shown this other side of the coin: they used customer Twitter feedback to turn the inauguration of a new route into a gigantic campaign. Check it out: