PR Nightmare: United Airlines Breaks Guitars
When United Airline luggage handlers broke Dave Carroll's guitar and a customer service rep bureaucratically weaseled out of fixing the problem, Carroll did what any angry consumer now does: He made a YouTube video.
Unfortunately for UAL, Carroll, front man for the band Sons of Maxwell, made a damn good one. And now United has thousands of people writing of similar bad experiences with the airline in posts all over the Web.
To make matters worse, United is responding by fixing the symptom, not the real problem. Says Frances Frei, an expert on customer service at the Harvard Business School:
"United spokespeople now say that they're going to use the video to help the company improve its service, and my prediction is that these efforts will fail. The company's language is tentative. If Carroll's experience illustrates a systematic pattern of failing customers -- and the anecdotal evidence suggests that it does -- then United's leadership will need to do something much bigger than launch a superficial service initiative."Employees are rarely the problem in these kinds of situations, Frei writes on her blog. Rather, it's the customer service model they operate under that sets them up to fail.
Example: That baggage handler who is throwing guitars around the tarmac is probably doing so to reduce plane turnaround time, a key performance factor stressed by the airline, Frei suggests.
Remember this next time one of your own employees fails a customer. The fault may be in how you designed the job rather than how it was performed.