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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