I wasn’t planning on writing about airlines and customer service for a while, but the carriers have a knack for constantly creating new streams of material.
Beth Negus’s "Pushing the Envelope" column, filed from the Direct Marketing Association conference, ( DIRECT Show Daily, ,Oct. 21) told of one set of experiences on United involving lost luggage and a rigid customer rep. I recently had another during a two-hour delay on U.S. Airways, which started with an inarticulate customer rep trying to give out essential flight cancellation information and ended with a flippant flight attendant who had a tin ear for the stressed and humorless mien of exhausted passengers two hours late for connecting flights.
In theory, airline management has the right to run its business any way it wants. If top brass chooses not to put resources into training frontline troops, supposedly a free market will punish it. But what makes the situation galling is that the airlines are coming, hat in hand, to the federal government and crying poverty. And the government is acting like an indulgent uncle, as opposed to a disciplinarian parent.
This means that even if customers choose to vote with their feet and stay away, airlines suffer few consequences for inept service. Bailouts cover a multitude of CRM sins. While Congress did stall on the most recent $4 billion bailout package, the airlines are hoping it will be slipped through during a post-election lame duck session.
So here’s a nifty idea for allocating federal money for troubled airlines: Let it be given on the basis of regularly conducted customer satisfaction surveys administered perhaps by the Federal Aviation Administration or another independent organization. And by independent I mean one that would otherwise be barred from doing any work on behalf of any airline.
Any carrier wanting federal funds would have to have met a certain threshold-- a high one--of customer satisfaction. Hey, if they’re going to be receiving taxpayer money, they should at least be held accountable to the taxpayers.
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