Catch the Ball

People who are not, themselves, sports fans will sometimes get upset with fans who express disappointment for poor performance on the field of play. They will say things like “Don’t complain about that player dropping that routine fly ball; you couldn’t do any better.” To anyone who is a regular fan of any professional sport, however, this is exactly the point: I can’t do any better, but I am not being paid $20 million per year to play this game. In baseball, for example, you need only be able to hit the ball once every three at-bats (about once in 20 tries, on average) and catch it perhaps three or four times in three hours in order to be considered a superstar and paid tens of millions of dollars. If all the team wants is a guy who will strike out four times, lose the ball in the sun, and run too slowly to do any good on offense or defense, they could just hire me for Center Field and save themselves the millions of dollars. I’d do the job for a living wage, assuming I could do it at all – and so would at least half of the fans in the stands…

Where this applies to a business principle is when we get into cases where the company is employing people (sometimes very large numbers of people) who can’t do the job either. A prime example would be the now infamous United Airlines Case, where the airline’s baggage handlers managed to damage a passenger’s $3,500 guitar, and the company then gave him the runaround for nearly a year before finally telling him he was out of luck and the airline wouldn’t consider making good the damage they had caused. While this is a stunning example of truly incompetent customer service at its worst, to me the most amazing thing is that this appears to be so common an occurrence that the Airline employs people in Chicago, New York, Dallas, and apparently outsources hundreds of additional customer service and call center jobs to India – and this is STILL the best effort they can produce…

Now, if you all you had was a few people in a small office block just off the airport in Chicago, for example, and this was the best you could come up with, that would be one thing. We could dismiss the foul-up as simply being the result of too little resources, not enough time, too few person-hours in the call center, or whatever. For that matter, if you were employing this vast, International network and eventually got a good, professional outcome, that would also be all right. You could think: “Well, United does spend a lot of money on their Customer Service operations, but they get good results in the end.” My question is, do you really need a global customer service network expending millions (hundreds of millions?) of dollars on salaries and telephone equipment, not to mention bandwidth, office space, and overhead, to just tell someone “no, we will not honor your claim?” Couldn’t the ramp agents in Chicago just have handled that? Or a single recorded voice on a toll-free message number? What about a cardboard cut-out of a Flight Attendant holding a sign that says “We’re not responsible for damage or loss or anything else that a sane person might expect us to take responsibility for?”

Of course, we don’t have the details of what went on in this case, and we can’t really say what efforts (if any) the different United Airlines personnel at the various locations actually made. From a customer service or public relations standpoint, however, it does not matter. The outcome was exactly the same as if they hadn’t had a single employee do anything, despite the apparently millions of dollars spent to maintain the customer service operations. If all United Airlines wants to do is squander money while letting their customer and public relations slide down the crapper, I’d certainly be willing to take it off their hands…

Or, alternately, there are a couple of baseball teams out there that could really use a new Center Fielder…