It’s Your Business
- Author: Terry Greenhut
- Subject Matter: Customer service
- Issue: Don’t be like the big guys
Learn customer service from the mom-and-pops
What do you think would happen if you sold a customer something and then refused to give it to him or her unless they were willing to upgrade to a more expensive one? Before you could say, “Spark plug” a lawyer, consumer affairs and possibly the attorney general’s office would be all over you. You definitely would have lost the customer and any referrals you were ever going to get and they would have written a scathing review online about your company. In other words there is no way you would ever get away with it.
It’s been awhile since I did a rant about the airlines. I thought I would leave them alone if they didn’t bother me, but as usual they started another war with their amazing lack of business sense and their worse customer relations techniques.
Flying is a horror show. Anyone who has ever had to do it for a living would agree unless they get so drunk or over-medicated before going that they don’t even realize how poorly they’re being treated. It was never great back when I used to do it every weekend, but at least it was tolerable; now it isn’t even that anymore. There actually was a time when you were respected as a customer and agents went a little out of their way to help you. Most of you are probably too young to remember that. Anyway, there was some legroom, you didn’t need to show up two hours early just to wait in line to get through security, and if you had a question, someone would at least make an effort to find you an answer.
Now to the fun. The airlines have taken to squeezing as many rows of seats as they can into an airplane. Their goal, it seems, is to make passengers so uncomfortable that they will upgrade to a seat with a couple more inches of legroom. They now charge for checked baggage, and rumor has it that they will soon start charging for carry-ons as well. They used to serve lunch on a flight, now you’re lucky if you get a cookie unless of course you buy one of their overpriced snack boxes. The price of a ticket keeps rising even though fuel costs are at historic lows and finding anyone whose language you can understand when you call customer service is getting harder and harder. Their call centers are mostly, if not all, based offshore and the English they speak is not what most North Americans can readily understand. The agents work for the company, not for the consumers who they are supposed to be helping, which is quite obvious based on their lack of concern.
Just an aside: Discover Card announced that all of its customer service is now U.S. based. That should help them get back some customers and build their business. Good for them. It’s about time some American companies are waking up. If they want our hard earned dollars they need to keep the jobs here. Legal immigrants came here to work and raise their families, not to see their jobs sent back to the countries they escaped from only to have those jobs done incompetently and for less than a living wage.
Back to the airlines: I had to book a nearly last-minute flight from Tampa to Denver and back the other day. The price was stupidly high but I expected it having booked at the last minute. What I didn’t expect was that when I booked it on the Orbitz website I got a message back that I was booked but that they couldn’t give me a seat number. I would have to call the airline directly for that. Strike one, because I hate calling the airlines; that’s why I book on Orbitz. At least they give me a voice I can understand and are very helpful solving issues they can actually control. Keep in mind that they buy thousands of tickets from the airlines every day so they have a lot more clout dealing with them than an individual would. In this case it was out of their control. They would gladly have told me my seat number if they could but they weren’t privy to that information either.
When I called the airline I wasn’t disappointed because if you have no expectation that anything good is going to happen and it doesn’t, you can’t be disappointed. As usual I was put through half a dozen prompts before I was allowed to speak to an agent. She was very hard to understand. When I asked about seat selection for my flight I was put on hold for more than 20 minutes and no one ever got back to me. I called again and explained to this agent that the last one put me on hold and never got back to me. She also put me on hold while she went to check on it (as if she was really doing that).
This time someone got back on after another 15-minute wait to tell me that the only way they could give me a seat number would be if I upgraded my seat for $99, other than that I would have to wait till I got to the airport. So, in other words, my seat number was being held hostage unless I paid the $99. I asked the agent, “Do I have a confirmed seat on the flight?” She told me I did. “Then what is the seat number?” I asked. She told me it would be assigned later, just before the flight. It was like the old “Abbott and Costello comedy routine, Who’s on First?” It just kept going around and around. I asked the agent, “If I bought the upgrade, would you be able to give me the seat number?” She said that she certainly would; so my seat number was definitely being held hostage.
Of course the only seats available when I got to the airport were middle seats. It’s as if they said, “We’ll teach this guy for not upgrading; we’ll just stick him in a middle seat.”
Why do they do business this way? Because they can. Every flight is full so they aren’t worried about selling seats. It didn’t used to be this way. There was a time when your business was appreciated. In some industries it still is but not the airline or for that matter the computer industry. If they appreciated customers they would use agents that can actually help people instead of just reading from the company script. In the case of the computer industry they would also stop putting those ridiculous error messages on your screen that tell you an error number but not what it is or how to fix it. I do truly believe, though, that they do it so that every couple of years you get so sick of the problems that you throw the computer through a plate glass window and have to buy a new one.
Unfortunately they don’t make printers any better than they do computers. They just keep putting new models out every week so you can’t use the leftover ink cartridges you paid so much money for, in your new printer. Case in point: I was shopping yesterday in Costco, a chain that does a great job of customer service, when I passed by the printer display. Printers only last a couple of years if you make the mistake of turning them on and trying to print with them. I have one that’s dying. Of course I just recently bought $200 worth of ink for it, so that’s the perfect time for it to die. I saw a printer on the shelf that’s the newest supposedly upgraded model of the one I have. The ink cartridges looked exactly like the ones in my present printer. In fact, they are only one model number away. I asked the Costco rep who was working in that aisle if I could use my old cartridges in the new printer. “Sorry,” he said. “The microchip is different. They’ll fit but they won’t work.” Just another case of let’s not make the product better. Let’s just keep making the customer waste more money because we can’t get it right.
When you used to ask a person, “What do you dread most,” the answer was always, “Having to go to the dentist.” Now it’s “having to call tech support or customer service.” Unless you have more free time than you know what to do with and can tolerate a lot of pain, you never want to make that call. First off they are almost impossible to understand. Next there’s a high probability that you know more about your computer or printer than they do because they are reading from a very limited script. When they get to the end of it and haven’t been able to solve your problem, they hand you off to someone with a more in-depth script. If he or she can’t help, you are then handed off to someone who may know something. That can be a couple of hours and several phone calls later. Why don’t they care? Because they’re making money; because if you don’t buy their stuff the next guy will, and they know it; so why do any better? That would involve putting pride ahead of money and we can’t have that.
Back to the airlines. I waited on the long line to get through security at Tampa on my way to Denver. There was no indicator on my boarding pass that I was approved for a TSA Precheck. If you are, then you don’t have to wait on the big long line. You go on a different line, one in which you don’t have to take off your shoes and empty your pockets or go through the full body X-ray machine, just the metal detector.
On my way back to Tampa I again waited on a much longer line at Denver. When I got up to the desk where the TSA agent checks your boarding pass and ID, he asked me why I waited on that big long line when right at the top of my boarding pass were the words “TSA Precheck.” I told him that I never
looked because it wasn’t there on my way out so I didn’t expect it to be on my way back. I never applied for it so why would the airline give it to me?
Then I wondered who else they are giving it to who never applied for it.
While waiting for my flight to leave, I Googled it and found out that to qualify for TSA Precheck status, you needed to file an application, pass an interview and screening process and then pay $85 to use the privilege for the next five years. Very strange. Either the airline doesn’t care who they are allowing to use the Precheck or its computers are totally screwed up and they don’t know who they’re giving it to.
Well, I made it through the weekend in spite of the airlines and their nonsense. Fortunately I went to Denver to train some pretty great service advisers and was really happy with the way the training progressed. I had trained for this multi-shop-owner training several times over the past 20 years and am always happy to see that the owner hires people who demonstrate exceptional care for his customers; but then, he wouldn’t have it any other way. He knows that’s what built his business. He’ll be opening another shop within the next couple of months and I’m sure he will be applying the same formula that has made the others the great success they are.
If only some of these mega businesses would take a cue about good customer relations tactics from the little “mom-and-Pop operations that bend over backwards to create and keep happy customers who want to do business with them again, what a pleasant business environment there would be. Don’t look for that to happen any time soon though, not as long as shareholder dividends and the way their company looks to the Wall Street critics drive their decision making.
