Saturday, May 16, 2015

Will They Ever Learn?

For years now I’ve been writing in this space, and occasionally elsewhere, about the importance of front-line (first level or first tier) customer service, and in particular about how failure in this position can render everything else the company does irrelevant. The sad reality is that even if the entire company has excellent customer service personnel, and provides exceptional service in general, to that one customer who we have completely failed, our entire company’s record is zero. None of this is new information, either; ask anyone associated with a service or consumer business, and they’ll all tell you how important good customer service (and good customer relations in general) is to the survival of the company. Right before they go back to treating the customer service personnel like cannon fodder…

Part of the problem is that turnover in any public-contact position is going to be rapid, because of the corrosive effect that working with public has on most people. Even though the majority of all customers are good people, it doesn’t take that many instances of being lied to, stolen from, screamed at, insulted, or otherwise abused to sour anyone’s opinion of the customers they are supposed to be serving. Over time, even very good employees burn out, shut down, or just stop trying – at which point we need to retrain or replace the worst cases and try to motivate whoever is left. It’s hard to convince anyone to invest money in employees whom they know will not last – in much the same sense that it is difficult to side with shifty, short-lived cannon fodder over paying customers who are actually giving us money. But as Don Henley notes, “apathy is worse…”

Consider, for example, the case of cancer patient Lisa Love, who was attempting to fly home from San Diego to Texas on American Airlines. Between her illness and the effects of the treatment, Love was not feeling well and asked an American gate agent to call a wheelchair for her. Said agent failed to do so, telling the passenger that “Oh, you look fine to me” and returning to her regular duties. This resulted in calls to the company that were not returned, emails and tweets that apparently never got to anyone who was prepared to do anything, and eventually calls to a consumer-advocate reporter and the resulting television news story and Internet account that you can view here if you want to…

Now, it’s not hard to imagine how something like this could happen. Think of any major airport on a busy day, and imagine a busy gate agent, trying to get a couple of hundred hot, cranky, generally uncooperative people onto an airliner without delaying the flight or throwing things any further behind schedule, when an apparently healthy passenger asks her to drop everything and summon a wheelchair and attendant. Maybe the agent is trying to cover the work of three people; maybe she’s had dozens of able-bodied people request wheelchairs so they can avoid having to walk a hundred yards extra; maybe she’s being paid peanuts and knows the odds of a raise this side of retirement are virtually nil; maybe it’s just a really crappy day. But however it came about, the company is now being mocked by dozens of scruffy bloggers all around the world for something they really do know was a bad idea…

If you consider the airline industry as a whole over the last thirty years or so, you will note that there is only one U.S. carrier that has consistently made money over that time period – it’s Southwest Airlines, which is known as much for its “Positively Outrageous Customer Service” (as the company calls it) as they are for their cut-rate airfares and slightly skeevy airplanes. I don’t believe this is a coincidence, any more than the success of Nordstrom is. Nor is it a coincidence that Southwest has generally taken better care of its employees than the industry standard. In almost every industry, if you examine the most successful companies, you will find that all of them have the best customer service and the best human resources practices of any firm in that industry. One could almost believe that there was some direct causal relationship…

None of this will come as any surprise to any student of management – or any experienced air traveler, for that matter. One has to wonder if American Airlines is ever going to take this lesson to heart, however…

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