Rants ‘n Raves Roundup – Week 3
Obviously, there are tons of customer service stories out there. And I’m not the only blogger blogging about them on a regular basis. So now, every Thursday, you can find my personal roundup of rants and raves from around the blogosphere. This week is a bit of a special edition to highlight a major fail and major win recoup for the airline we all love to pick on because they’re so good at putting themselves out there: United Airlines.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned United in a social media post and embedded the world-famous United Breaks Guitars video by Dave Carroll. United’s latest snafu has to do with Step Davis, a professional climber and BASE jumper (among many other talents). On a trip back from Switzerland, United managed to lose her jumping gear – worth over $12k! She tells of the full experience in her blog (plus you get to see some pictures of some of the awesome – in the true sense of the word – stuff that she does).
Steph, of course, did her best in contacting United and trying to impress upon them the importance and value of this gear. They didn’t get it at first. And in the meantime, the Twitterverse sure let @UnitedAirlines know about it!
Whether it was due to the publicity and Tweep-support or to Steph’s relentless dedication in communicating with United to get her gear back, she is now going to be fully compensated for her lost gear! She writes another blog post explaining the details. Now, I don’t know if United managed to recover Steph as a customer, but they did manage to do the right thing and resolve the situation. As one of Steph’s Tweeps said, it’s important to Tweet the good and the bad – it’s only fair to the company, especially after a “slip-up” such as this.
I’d love to hear others’ opinions (rants and/or raves!) about United Airlines. I’ll admit I have a huge chip on my shoulder when it comes to United*, so I really would like to hear if someone thinks differently about them!
*Gotta love their “give us more money and we’ll give you lots of luxurious leg room” upgrade option. Did ya think we wouldn’t notice where that extra legroom came from? The plane sure as heck didn’t get longer, and I’m fairly sure that you didn’t take any rows of seats out. I did notice, however, that my “cattle-class” seat had even less legroom than before. Thanks, United, for making people with long legs, overweight people (You get to pay twice! Even if we have extra seats!), and people who like to bring luggage with them feel extra-special! Way to enhance the user experience for some of your customers!
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Tags: customer service fail, customer service win, united, user experience, ux
Man, is United just getting bloodied recently…and fairly so. Interestingly (I'm hoping everyone at United cringed at this one), my colleague attended the Right Now Tech users conference two weeks ago where Dave Carroll was a keynote speaker. And, wouldn't you know it. he flew to Denver on United and they lost his luggage on the way to the conference. They wrote his keynote for him!
I understand that airlines is a lousy business to be in. But, good grief, if you're going to be in it, make a half hearted effort to think like a hospitality company, not a freight carrier. Hell, FedEx takes better care of my packages than the passenger carriers take care of us.
Side note – even though SouthWest gets customer service kudos, lets not give them a free pass just because, the bar has been set so low by their competition. (p.s. I like SouthWest. wish I could fly them more)
I heard about Dave Carroll's second experience with United – what a blunder! I saw it go by on Twitter the other day that a pilot of theirs just got arrested for drunk flying. I'm a bit biased in the wrong way when it comes to United, but they just keep finding ways to make themselves shine!
Good point about Southwest – they shouldn't get a free pass – but man, are they good at what they do. I'd be interested to find out about their complaint department. (Hmm, seems there are a decent amount of results for “southwest airlines sucks” on Google. Might be an interesting post.)