O O Ø O O O O
Choice
Dear Airline Gate Agent,
I was wondering if you’ve flown lately. If you have - and I suspect you have - I was wondering if you had a) listened to the announcement one of the crew gives as you taxied to the terminal at the end of your flight and b) noticed how your airline has performed and is expected to perform. No? Please allow me to provide a refresher.
The announcement is a bit of information and a bit of marketing. You’re told what city you’ve arrived in, what time it is locally, and what gates the connecting flights for passengers on the plane are departing from. Occasionally you get a joke and the temperature thrown in, but that’s typically limited to fun airlines like Southwest and Westjet. The marketing is a simple thank you to the passengers for choosing that particular carrier from all the other carriers out there.
With me so far? Good.
Your company has been struggling a little of late. It’s filed for bankruptcy protection twice in the last three years, and was recently acquired by another airline. The acquisition was intended to create an airline with coast-to-coast routes that competes in the ruthless discount space. That market is ruthless, and your company has stated that the way they will differentitate themselves is by their customer service. If your company can’t differentiate themselves, then their revenue will continue to fall, with all the bad that goes with that.
So, to recap: Passengers have a choice, and if enough of them choose an airline other than yours, you probably won’t be around long.
There’s a lot of reasons passengers choose a different airline. A lot of times it’s cheaper fares, but my experience has led me to believe that an awful lot of people switch because of craptacular customer service. The craptacular service can be a series of events over a period of time, or it can be one event that is just so stupid that it sticks in the brain forever.
Need an example of one such stupid event? I thought you might.
One of your customers has purchased a flight from their home up North. The total travel time is around ten hours, six of which will be spent on one leg going coast to coast. The customer knows this, so takes advantage of the tools your airline provides and selects an exit row seat. The exit row seat has considerable extra room in the aircraft, and is ideal because it will allowed unencumbered use of a laptop for the entire flight, which will allow your customer to get a considerable amout of work done.
Your customer arrives after the first leg and has a couple hours to spare. They proceed to the gate area to wait, grab a seat, and pull out a book until the flight is called. While they are waiting they notice another passenger-we’ll call them “shithead” so you can keep track of which passenger is which-approach the gate. It seems that all the exit row seats have been allocated, and shithead is quite perturbed about not being able to get one because they paid full fare. After ten minutes or so of listening to shithead whine, the two of you reach an agreement of some sort. Your customer from the North observes all this.
After a couple minutes of fiddling with your computer, you page your customer from the North. They put their book down and walk over to you, and you ask to see their boarding pass. You take their boarding pass with the exit row seat assignment, and you hand them a new boarding pass with a different seat with no explanation. When your customer asks what, exactly, is going on, you inform them that you don’t know how they got that seat, but that they’re not entitled to it.
Your customer is somewhat stunned, and explains that they got the seat the same way they always do, by requesting the seat and confirming it on check-in at the start of the journey. You pause, think about it for a second, and decide to lie through your teeth. You tell the customer that the person who is getting their seat paid an extra $400 for their ticket, which entitles them to “premium” seating. You repeat again that they should never have received the seat that was requested and assigned to them.
Your customer knows this is not true because coach is coach, and that the only premium seats on your airline are up front. They have flown the same flight before, and have always been able to get the exit row regardless of fare by asking for it. They tell you this. Clearly not wanting to discuss the matter, you end the discussion by delivering the line “then you should know that seat reservations are not guaranteed and besides, you’re flying a much cheaper fare than the passenger I reassigned, so you don’t deserve that seat.” When your customer starts to ask for the customer service contact information, you re-assert the fact that the other customer paid more, and then you walk off.
The customer from up North is put in a cramped seat at the back of the aircraft, and cannot complete the work they need to do during the six hour flight. Instead, they must stay up late into the night after arriving over an hour late at their destination. Instead of being well-rested and happy, they are pretty much pissed off, especially because the person you put them beside has some of the nastiest body odour going. All in all, it is not a good experience for your customer.
Now, here’s where we wrap it all together.
The customer from up North likes your airline, and has enjoyed flying it up until this very second. They have liked it so much that in the past six months they have chosen your airline over all the others for eight round trips, which is around twenty-six flight segments. Half of those eight round trips were full fare, and the total money spent over those six months was approximately nine thousand dollars. While nine thousand dollars is not a lot compared to the company at large, for one individual it’s not bad.
The key statement in the preceeding paragraph was “until now”. Your little story in how they weren’t entitled to a seat because they weren’t the right class of coach flier, followed by bluster when BS was called was annoying. You told the customer that they didn’t “deserve” the seat, and then put a price on what a valued customer was for that one flight. The entire episode has made it clear how little you, and by association your airline, care about that customer.
The “choice” response has just been triggered. Your customer from the North knows they do indeed have a choice, and from now on that choice will not include your airline whenever possible. This one customer is just a drop in the bucket, so what’ll it hurt? With the angle the bucket is on, if you get enough drops, it’ll fall over. Then there’ll be no drops at all, and the bucket will be shitcanned.
To put it in plain english: your airline can’t afford to piss off people, but if they do it’ll go belly up and take your job with it. You should probably think about that.
* sigh *
It’s really a petty little thing, and I know that I’m over-reacting (I’m also mostly over it). However, taking my boarding pass without saying a thing, changing my seat assignment because another customer gave you a hard time, and then justifying it because I didn’t pay as much this one time out of many is galling. Your one action has indelibly stained your company’s reputation with me forever, because you thought it was just fine to tromp all over me without an explanation or an apology.
I don’t envy what you have to put up with day in and day out, but other people’s behaviour is not my fault. I shouldn’t have to pay for it and, in the long term, I won’t.
Kev Needham
November 9, 2005
OOØOOOODCCXXIX
November 9th, 2005 at 6:05 am
Having spent a fair amount of time flying around various parts of the world, it never ceases to amaze me how fantastically appalling the customer service on North American flights is. It seems particularly bizarre given how good the customer service in almost every other sector is. How they survive entirely escapes me. Surely there’s a gap in the market for an airline with proper customer service?
November 9th, 2005 at 8:49 am
This rant will be much more satisfying when you fill in the airline name here:
November 9th, 2005 at 9:25 am
err… umm… it’s that blue airways one with the stylised US flag on the side :)
November 9th, 2005 at 1:15 pm
Bryson - I whole-heartedly agree, and some airlines on this side do a bang-up job. They tend to be smaller than the behemoths, and all the experiences with companies like WestJet and JetBlue (started by the same person - surprise!) have been very positive.
I think the airlines recognize it, and I will say that service has gone up quite a bit. In this case it wasn’t the airline itself, and barring the encounter with the mean ‘ole gate person, the flight was pleasant enough.
The problem for the airline in question is that their representative didn’t really give a shit. Overwhelmingly all the other experiences I’ve had with other representatives has been great, so it’s really too bad that the bad egg is the one I’ll remember.
The big boys don’t really survive on their own merits in the US. Instead of changing their business model like most other airlines have done, they continue to limp along getting handouts from their feds or labour concessions from the courts.
There’s a lot of other reasons, including over-scheduled airports, ludicrous scheduling that puts 70% of the flights in two 3-hr windows during the day, and a beleagured and often hostile workforce that think they’re owed more than they receive.
But ya, air travel in the US sucks. Canada’s not so bad anymore, with WestJet kicking Mapleflot’s ass so badly that they’re actually ok to fly on again, provided you avoid Pearson like the plague.
November 9th, 2005 at 5:10 pm
I failed to avoid Pearson.
Suck.