Don’t Complain

No, seriously; don’t bother complaining. At least, if you’re flying Delta Airlines and you have a complaint about any aspect of their service, including not taking you to the destination you’ve hired them to transport you to, losing your bags, taking forever to board or deplane an airplane, or even sitting on the tarmac for hours at a time waiting for an opportunity to take off, you shouldn’t bother trying to complain to the company. Because they’re definitely not listening; they apparently don’t even have a telephone line available to listen to you…

A story published this week in Time Magazine makes the surprising claim that Delta no longer has a customer service number, and requires all inquiries to the airline be made in writing, either by e-mail or by conventional mail. There is a company 800-number, but it’s used entirely for Frequent Flyer issues, and the Representatives assigned to it will just refer anyone with a conventional customer service issue to the website. American Airlines stopped taking customer complaints by telephone some time ago – considering some of the people they had working the phones, it’s probably just as well. And United Airlines apparently shut down their customer service lines just a few months ago – around the time I was asking why they even HAD a customer service department if they weren’t going to do anything to mollify their customers. Maybe I should be more careful about whom I mock…

Now, on the face of it such a policy seems like a clear violation of the Second Law of business (“Don’t annoy the customer!”) as well as all common sense. If someone is having a problem with your operation, telling them to send you an email and you’ll look into it really isn’t much help; they want someone to find their missing bag and tell them when it will be arriving, address the fact that they’re being harmed, or cheated or grossly inconvenienced and try to make it right, or at least reassure them that the company DOES care about their business and will attempt to take care of them. Complaints can be handled by email easily enough – problems that occurred hours or days earlier do not require immediate correction, and most people would be just as happy to register their complaint and then go do something while you process it. But when there’s an actual crisis – or even an ongoing problem – email is never going to replace a human voice…

Unfortunately, this appears to be the direction the entire industry is going. Customer Service Representatives are expensive, not least of all because each one of them can only really take care of one customer at a time. To handle the volume from a large customer base you need a large number of CSRs, along with a large number of telephones, computer terminals, desks, and an inconveniently large building in which to house them. This is the real reason so many call centers have been outsourced to countries where the labor and the real estate are relatively cheap, and why you can often find yourself talking with a guy with a thick Bangalore accent who says his name is Joe. But as previously noted with regard to baggage fees and charges for services that used to be free, budget cuts and petty nickel-and-dime fees are not going to save any company, let alone an entire industry, from financial destruction…

Perhaps in the long run the airlines can find some way of making this new business model work. Maybe they can incorporate text messaging or Instant Messenger services into their online customer service sites and create a text-based immediately available service model. Maybe people will grow to appreciate not having to deal with different accents and crappy telephone connections and instead getting clear, easy-to-read replies on the screen. Maybe the reply time for email or text message replies can be brought down to a few minutes, which would definitely be better than waiting on hold for the next Representative for two or three hours…

But in the meanwhile, if you need to complain about something, you’d best get ready to put everything in writing – and keep a copy…