Airline Follies International – Part Deux

In yesterday’s post I mentioned the spectacular customer service failure sustained by Air Berlin after they managed to leave an entire flight’s worth of luggage behind at the airport – and then lose all track of it. There has been some speculation about how this happened – some observers have contended that the pilot was under pressure to keep to his schedule and left before any luggage had been loaded so as to arrive on time – but there’s very little doubt that this was a screw-up of truly legendary proportions. It also seems clear that someone in the airline’s hierarchy thought that using Twitter – and specifically using a Twitter bot, or expert system, to send form-letter responses to customers, would improve their situation by making the company look “hip” and “tech-savvy” and perhaps even “efficient.” Unfortunately, it appears to have made the company look even more cluelessly tone-deaf than they already did…

You can pick up the Slate story here again if you need it, but the outcome of this folly was as predictable as it was simple – except, perhaps, to the sort of people who still believe that the Internet is some kind of magic construct that can turn back time, create products (or even wads of cash!) out of thin air, or win you the hearts of customers. Using a Twitter account, or for that matter, Face Book posts, text messages, or emails, can improve customer relations by allowing your customers to gain access to your customer service personnel more easily, and receive answers much more quickly. Responding to customer inquiries using canned responses from an automated response software package (the online equivalent of recorded messages on an answering machine) not only prevents your customers from making contact in that fashion, it actually sends the message that you can’t even be bothered to hire a live person to man the Twitter account and send any meaningful reply…

Now, for all you or I know, there might have been nothing a Twitter representative could have told the passengers beyond what the automated response system was saying. It’s even possible that the recorded messages were telling the truth, and the company was entirely dependent on the airport’s lost-and-found personnel to handle the situation. But by confronting customers who were already angry with an automated response – by effectively sending the message of “we don’t care how angry you are or how badly we may have treated you” – the company was making an already bad situation far worse. And I can’t help thinking that anyone with even a room-temperature IQ would already have known that. It does not take complex statistical analysis or sophistical opinion sampling techniques to figure out that people will get angry when you take their money, lose their property, and then blow off their attempts to get it back…

I don’t know how many companies out there are using automated responses – or the more advanced “expert systems” to respond to routine customer inquiries, let alone how many are leaving those systems operating even when the situation is anything but routine. I do know that it doesn’t take all that long to type out 140 characters, and that unless every member of your customer service staff is working at maximum capacity on every shift, you could probably find someone around the office to write real replies to non-standard questions. Of course, that would require devoting time and money to actually providing superior customer service, rather than just talking about doing so, and we’ve all seen how appealing that is to companies who are trying to hold down labor costs. But the alternatives for failing to do so are becoming increasingly severe, and at this rate even a basic failure of this type runs the risk of having scruffy bloggers on the other side of the world mock you for the fun of it…

And of making potential customers who had never heard of your company before vow to take a bus – or ride a horse – before they will fly with you…