Look, up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s…customer relationship managlement!
The travel experience of two attendees from a Massachusetts-based company to the conference was a perfect example of how not to treat your customers if you want to engender any kind of loyalty.
The women (who asked not to be identified by name) left Boston’s Logan Airport on the 8:45 a.m. flight Saturday. Two minutes into the trip, a flock of birds flew into the plane. The passengers got naturally alarmed as the plane shook, it’s wing flaps fluttered oddly and a fireball shot out as an engine was damaged.
Thankfully, the plane was able to land safely back at Logan with no injuries to any of the passengers. United’s reps on the ground did their best to get everyone rescheduled to other flights, either later that day—or, as our travelers understandably requested—the next morning.
This would have been all well and good—if the airline then hadn’t promptly lost one of the ladies’ checked bags. She wanted to retrieve it before leaving the airport on Saturday, but was told it had already been sent ahead on the next flight. Upon arrival in San Francisco the next morning, the bag was nowhere to be found.
The baggage claim customer service rep did everything possible to not be helpful. First she refused to call Boston to check on the bag, explaining she wasn’t allowed to call out of state. She wouldn’t give our traveler the phone number to call herself, nor would she use the traveler’s cell phone to make the call. Finally, a supervisor did call Boston, and cheerfully reported that the bag had never left Logan. Our friend finally got her bag yesterday morning.
What, you might ask, did United do to compensate her? A free flight? An allowance to buy the necessities she needed to get through a night without her luggage? Nope. The airline didn’t even offer her a bag of stale peanuts.
“I feared for my life on Saturday morning,” she said. “The least they could have done is pretend to care.”
Here’s hoping your trip home is uneventful.
