I should probably stop picking on various airlines for their
baggage handling weakness; it’s almost inevitable that when you are moving tens
of millions of items every day, you’re going to lose a few of them – either literally,
because something got stolen, thrown in the trash or just dumped somewhere off
the airport grounds, or virtually, because your computers can’t find the
tracking number anywhere in the system. This doesn’t make the security breaches
any more excusable, however; if someone can break into a secure area in order
to steal something, they could easily do so in order to plant a bomb or
sabotage an airplane. It doesn’t make employee theft any less serious, either;
all companies do have some amount of theft by employees, but anyone who would
risk both their job and imprisonment for a few hundred dollars worth of random
junk is probably also stupid enough to smuggle something aboard an airliner in
exchange for a few quick dollars…
Even worse, from a business standpoint, is that for the most
part your customers do not care how well you have served anyone other than
them. It does not matter to most people if you only lost 1 bag out of the
10,000,000 you processed today; your success rate may be 99.9999% overall, but
to that specific customer your success rate is zero. You can overcome most of
the problem by providing good service to that customer, in terms of people who
are helpful and competent in helping to find the missing luggage, arranging to
get it to the customer before anything untoward can happen, providing compensation
for any issues that arise because you lost their bags, refunding any baggage
charges they have incurred, and (most importantly of all) never doing this to
them again. But none of these things typically happen, and even if they do, it
would still do very little to appease people whose dogs mysteriously “escaped”
taking their carriers with them, people whose property was destroyed despite
being in armored cases, or pole vaulters whose 14-foot poles the airline has
managed to lose…
You can pick up the story off the MSNBC News site if you
want to, but the basic idea is that a Central Washington University student
named Kati Davis was travelling from Seattle to Colorado Springs for the NCAA Division
II Track and Field Championships last month when Delta managed to lose her
equipment – specifically the 14-foot poles used in the pole vault competition. In
fairness, the airline did eventually find the poles again, but not after
sending them to Salt Lake City and then leaving them in Atlanta for two days
before finally sending them to Denver. As a result, Ms. Davis had to use
borrowed equipment during the actual track meet, and her performance suffered
accordingly. The fact that she had paid a fee of $200 to get her equipment
shipped, and that it took five calls to the airline and a lot of being given
the runaround before anything happened, just makes things worse…
Now, the fact is that Delta actually has one of the best
baggage handling records of any major airline – and, in fact, has consistently
been the best, cheapest and safest way to transport animals by air, as well.
But the lost (stolen) animals outrages of the past year or so have badly
damaged their reputation, and if there are any further cases of
championship-level athletes being screwed over things will get worse in a
hurry. I’m not suggesting that any company can have a perfect customer service
record, or that doing so is even a realistic goal for a company operating on
such a scale. But everyone who has ever worked customer service knows that the
key to maintaining good customer relations is to take care of your customers
and make things right when they go wrong – and in this case they didn’t even
try…
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