Piling On

I’m not sure what I can say about the current United Airlines situation that hasn’t been said by millions of business bloggers (and travel bloggers, one assumes) since the story broke. If you missed it, the story goes that United had oversold a flight from Chicago to Louisville, and then compounded the problem by trying to get four passengers to give up their seats so that a flight crew could get to Louisville in time for the flight they were supposed to work the next day. When no one volunteered, the airline selected four passengers who were already on board the aircraft and attempted to eject them. One of these four people took exception to being forced to give up his seat, refused to leave the plane, and was eventually forcibly removed by ground security personnel – literally kicking and screaming…

In any era prior to this one, the whole episode would probably not have made it onto the local television news; it might have made the local paper if it was reported at all. Unfortunately, in an age when almost literally everyone carries a camera around with them every day it is unrealistic to expect that no one on the plane wouldn’t have recorded video of the whole thing and posted it to various social networking sites before the flight even took off. It shouldn’t have surprised anyone that a graphic (and to some extent disturbing) video like this one would have gone viral immediately, either, or that this would cause additional Public Relations nightmares for a company that isn’t exactly known for good PR or good customer relations. Why it appears to have come as a surprise to senior management is beyond me…

Now, we should probably acknowledge that overbooking flights – and bumping people off of them when necessary – has been standard practice within the airline industry for decades. It’s completely legal, and in fact you have already agreed to put up with it – there is a clause in your ticket agreement that give the airline the explicit right to do that. It is also probably worth noting that for most of its existence, the airline industry has wielded enormous political and financial power in the US, and senior management personnel have apparently gotten used to answering to their stockholders, the FAA, Congress and the Unions before they consider what their customers might want. And I’m sure you already know that most people my age and older don’t automatically think about how the world will view their actions, if only because they don’t think of the world as watching them…

What struck me about the affair wasn’t the remarkable tone-deafness of the management team, as demonstrated by the CEO’s non-apology for the events, or the laughable incompetence displayed by the customer service personnel involved. It was the fact that United appears to see this whole situation as being nothing more than business as usual; this is the way they have done business for generations, and they see no reason to change now. But the fact is this level of disregard for your customers and disdain for anything they or the general public might feel about your company would have represented gross incompetence even before any given disgruntled passenger could share his or her gripes with every other potential customer in the world in a matter of seconds. And even more importantly, perhaps, this situation is not going to change…

As we plummet ever further into this new century, every customer-contact position must be treated as if everyone in the world is watching, because they effectively are. And every employee who holds such a position needs to be trained to ask him or herself how they would handle the situation in front of them if the whole affair was going to appear on every television and Internet news channel in the world within a few minutes, because it probably will be. Simple, ordinary, it-could-happen-to-anybody mistakes will be bad enough; errors that involve callous disregard for your customers, putting the company’s interest ahead of the customers, or violation of either criminal or civil law will at minimum damage your corporate image and credibility, and may very well end up destroying the entire company if you annoy enough of the wrong people badly enough…

But that’s a story for another day…