Customer Service is Scary
Posted Friday August 31, 2007 in Business
Giving good customer service is tough. It’s easy to get 90% of it right and still leave the customer with a bad taste in their mouth — an unpleasant truth when your business model depends on delighting the customer, as does mine. I was reminded of the delicacy of customer service last weekend, when a major airline lost my bags.
My sweetie and I were on a quick weekend getaway to Las Vegas. Now, I’ve traveled a bunch, and I’ve never had much trouble with my bags getting lost. So, with small planes and now the limitations on fluid container size, I just checked my little roll-on for our late-evening flight. Of course, it didn’t get there with me.
And that’s when we had our first good interaction with the airline — oh, heck, I’ll name it, our first good interaction with Delta. Delta’s baggage customer service rep at the airport was the picture of reassurance. He found our bags in the system, explained exactly what had happened and was going to happen, told us we could expect our bags by the very early morning, and really made us feel like there was no problem. So we went out and enjoyed the blackjack tables for a while.
When we returned to our room, we called after the bags, and were told they weren’t there. I called Delta’s lost baggage number and got an outsourced operator. Now, this was what you’d call a bad interaction. He promised us the bags sometime in the next 18 hours — which hurt even more because he swore they were at the Las Vegas airport already.1 Then he vastly mispronounced the name of the hotel I was staying at and asked me for the street address, which is hardly a morale-booster when staying in one of the more notable hotels on the Strip, Las Vegas’s center of tourism and gambling. I couldn’t even get an attempt to assure me that the bags would be delivered by the morning; of course, there’s a big difference between getting your bags first thing in the morning and getting them in the evening, or at least there is for those of us who like to put on clean clothes daily.
After I gave up on this conversation, we turned in, and, by the time we got up, our bags were at the hotel. Another good experience! But I didn’t think “oh, yes, just as they promised!” Instead, I thought “wow! I guess Delta isn’t as hopelessly incompetent as I thought. Somehow our bags did make it here!”
So, despite a helpful person at the airport and prompt service, my impression is that Delta is hopeless. And most consumers set similarly high bars. So how easy is it for me to mess up one of several customer service interactions with a customer? And what are the consequences? It’s a scary thought.
1 If you haven’t been to Las Vegas, the airport is maybe 15 minutes from the hotels on the Strip.
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