Writing about all of my bad customer service experiences would be a full-time job, so I let most of them roll by with a shrug or a sad shake of the head. Yet every now and then, someone sets the bar so low, it’s remarkable. Take, for example, my experience with American Airlines yesterday. An opportunity dropped into their lap to turn a routine business problem into a positive customer experience, but it just wasn’t in their DNA. Instead, they turned the full force of the people, infrastructure and systems within their customer service group toward making the problem so much worse, I had to write about it.

The airlines handle a lot of baggage, carousel after carousel of it, all different shapes and sizes and constructions. When you carry that many of anything, especially under time pressure, you’re bound to drop a few. According to the most recent SITA statistics, 25 million pieces of luggage are “mishandled” every year. That’s about 3,000 bags per hour every day. It’s just like the lottery; the more often you play, the more likely you are to win. I understand that.

When I landed in SFO at 8:00 PM from Miami, my number was up. Of the five bags check by my party, one was a no-show. I waited until the carousel with the last few orphan bags slowly ground to a halt, then I walked over to the American Airlines baggage service counter and stood in line. When my turn came, I showed them my tags, answered a few questions, and waited while they wrestled an answer from their primitive terminal. Sorry, so answer. Perhaps it was placed on a later flight. Here’s an 800 number you can call after midnight. Nothing more to do here, I went home and hoped for the best. After all, almost 97% of bags are ultimately reunited with their owners. Plus, my flight had been a single leg (52% of all mishandles occur at connections.)

I don’t know what I expected to happen next. I paid American Airlines $30 to have a bag moved from MIA to SFO and they failed. I know if FedEx screwed up, they would contact me. In the afternoon, still not having heard from AA, I called the 800 number and was advised that yes, my bag had been put on a later flight and had arrived in San Francisco at 11:00 AM this morning. I could pick it up at any time.

Pick it up? No, I don’t think so. I live over 30 miles from that airport; city miles. They lost it, they should deliver it. “I’m sorry,” the customer service voice said insincerely, “but you have only four hours from the time of arrival to file a lost baggage tracer. Since you did not do that, we can’t deliver it to you. If you like, I can have it shipped, but you’ll have to pay the fees.”

In a moment I went from “understanding — lost luggage is a fact of air travel” to “relieved — they found my bag (800,000 bags a year are never recovered)” to “furious – you guys screwed up and now you’re trying to make it be my problem.”

“Lost baggage tracer? What is that? What was all of that waiting in line at the AA Baggage Service Center, answering questions and showing them documents?”

“They should have told you that you have four hours to file a tracer,” continued my tormentor. “And, since there is no tracer on this bag, that’s all I can do for you. Your bag is here when you want to pick it up.”

Obviously, this wouldn’t do. I asked to speak to a supervisor.

I tell the story again to a new person, and again am told that I violated the four-hour rule. “This is the first I’ve heard about any of this. I thought they were filing a claim when I reported the bad missing at the airport.” I told him. “Does it make sense to you that I would wait in line at the Baggage Service Counter to report my missing bag, be told that I have only four hours in which to report it, otherwise they are relieved of their responsibilities and then… what? Refused? Changed my mind?”

“I can’t believe we are even having this conversation. This isn’t the old days, when you carried my bag for free. You charged money to carry that bag. It was supposed to be here at 8:00 PM last night and it didn’t get here until 11:00 this morning. You screwed up. You need to just man-up, admit it, and get it to me as quickly as you can.”

In reality, the people at the Baggage Service Center in San Francisco are geniuses. By not filling out a tracer, and not informing me of the process, they have not only saved their company a ton of money on baggage delivery fees, they have also made American’s lost baggage statistics look better. By law, these claims have to be tallied and reported to the Department of Transportation where they become a matter of public record.

How is American doing? They lose 4.3 bags per thousand passenger miles, the most of any national carrier. Their regional service, American Eagle, loses a whopping 9.19, the highest number reported by any airline. (To give credit where credit is due, AirTran loses only 1.97.)

I don’t know if the dim bulb of justice finally flickered on in this guy’s brain, or if I just wore him out, but he finally agreed to waive the “four-hour” rule and deliver my bag.

We call ourselves a “service economy.” I suppose that’s because everyone is so economical about dispensing customer service. But that’s really looking through the wrong end of the telescope. The mission of the customer service organization should be to build customer loyalty, not control costs.

When things are going well, it’s easy to be nice. It’s only when the going gets rough that you find out what a person, or a company, is made of. Customers who experience service problems that are dealt with appropriately by the company score far higher on loyalty measurements than customers who have never had a problem at all.

In the case of American Airlines, they wound up delivering my bag for free anyway, but first they invested a bunch of resources into pissing me off. It’s hard to see how they came out ahead.

No related posts.

I’m having some difficulty understanding how retailers think they are going to stay in business.

Case in point: I traveled across Chicago tonight to Best Buy looking for two simple items that they should logically carry. One was a desktop tripod for a cell phone making it easier to take pictures with the built-in camera. The other was a pocket battery booster to give your cellphone extra life in case the battery runs down. Both are simple items, easily found on the Internet. But why not pick them up right now, while I’m thinking about it?

After a 20 minute trip to the store, I spent another 20 minutes with sales people explaining what I was looking for, then following them around while they looked for things and attempted to find other, presumably more senior, personnel. Complete failure. “We could order it for you and have it shipped to the store,” offered one young sales associate. Now if THAT isn’t the worst of both world’s, I don’t know what is.

In all fairness though, the 20 minute trip back from the store wasn’t wasted. While I sat on the train, I ordered the items I needed from two different Internet retailers at prices which, including the shipping, would have produced head-spinning margins for Best Buy.

And don’t think it’s just the folks at Best Buy who are dropping the ball. The week before, I read about a new best-seller book I thought I’d enjoy. I would have just ordered it from Amazon, but in a moment of enlightened self-interest, I thought “why not head down to my local Barnes and Noble and give them the business?”  Here’s why:

Not wanting to wait in line for an assistant, I scoured the shelves and end-caps. Not finding it, I waited in line. “That’s funny,” he told me “I see that we have them on order but they don’t seem to be here.” No estimated due date, no nothing.

I need to update my model of the world. I always thought that if you wanted it NOW or you needed some help with your product selection, you went to your local retailer. If you just wanted the lowest price and the greatest assortment, you ordered from the web.

Every day the web becomes a fiercer and fiercer competitor; the selection is better, the pricing is better, the information about the product is better, and it’s easier to find things.

The only advantages to retail are that you can physically touch the product and you can create an experience around shopping for it. But for the most part, retailers have just stayed the same. They are just standing in the trash compactor as it closes around them.

So today, it would seem, you are better off ordering the things you need off the web. Retailers are just for…uh… See? That’s where I get stuck. Why do we need retailers?

No related posts.

"Do you see what I see?"

Every good designer knows the rules about page layout. Your eye goes first to the headline, then to the caption of the picture, then to the picture… whatever. But if you’re really serious about page layout and GUI design, you have to use eyetracking.

The problem is, eyetracking is really expensive and time-consuming. You need special equipment and a testing environment and, probably most difficult to come by, test participants. Maybe…

Now, a group of artificial vision scientists who call themselves Feng-GUI Lab have created a piece of software that simulates the human vision process. You can upload a still image or a movie and in seconds approximate the results of a weeks worth of human testing. Their website allows you to try out a free image analysis every three hours. I tried an analysis of my home page. The result is displayed above (click on it for a larger view).

Feng-GUI also has a lot of interesting applications of AI vision analysis listed on their home page including “smart thumbnails,” the technique of only including the visually interesting part of a picture. Make your own AI eyetracking simulations here.

Links:

• Good info on consumer Web visual behavior
• 5-step formula for creating a David Ogilvy-style ad layout

No related posts.

QR code in the Wild

That funny looking symbol on my new business card is a QR code. Lately these little beasties have been cropping up on everything from T-shirts to magazine ads.

The QR (Quick Response) code is a two-dimensional bar code that can store contact info, URLs, even paragraphs of text. Although they were invented clear back in 1994, they were relegated to industrial applications until a new generation of consumer electronics made them practical for just about everything.

Now that phones like the Android and iPhone have easy to use software for decoding them, QR codes are spawning a new generation of applications called “hardlinking” or “physical world hyperlinking” that make it easy for consumers to capture data from products, magazines, billboards and even each other’s phones.

You can get your own QR codes to start pasting on stuff at the link below.

Related:

• Make your own QR Code courtesy of ZXing project

• Google image search of social QR code applications

• Silicon Alley Insider, “Mobile Barcodes: Big In France!”

• Social Media Examiner, “How QR Codes can Grow your Business”

No related posts.

"I will use less power."

I hate to keep picking on the big oil companies, but really, they set themselves up for it. I mean, who would even think of running an ad on a giant electric billboard to tell us how committed they are to using less electricity.

Here’s a shot of the kilowatt monstrosity near the east entrance to the Bay Bridge. To add insult to injury, there’s another one near the Ashby exit in Berkeley.

And you wonder why I am so cynical.

No related posts.

"Visit Our Website"

When “King Kong” opened as a film in 1933, its pioneering special effects (stop motion animation and miniature models) amazed and terrified audiences. Sixty years later, we find that same animation laughable.

Audiences learn quickly and rapidly grown in sophistication once exposed to a new media. Remember how we used to have to write “CLICK HERE” next to hypertext links? And now, all you have to do is change the cursor rollover or the link text.

What was once amazement soon turns to boredom. All you needed to do to get people to come to your website in 1998 was to let them know that you had one. Novelty and curiosity drove audiences to your site in herds. But as competition for online attention increased, website promotion became a real challenge. We started putting our URL on everything, running contests and promotions, producing videos and complex campaigns in hopes of rising above the noise level. Pretty much, the race is over.

People don’t have time to come to your website anymore. You are expected to have one, and frankly, you are expected to delight us when we visit it. But we don’t want to go there anymore. We have other places to be and other things to do. What other things?

We are planning our entertainment activities, chatting with friends and sharing baby pictures and motorcycle wipeouts. We’re too busy speculating on ball scores and making fun of the government to drag our browsers over to your site to learn about your product or service. If you have something to say to us, you had better package it up like a burger and fries and hand it to us as we drive by.

That’s why social networking is so important to marketers. [bedtime...more on this later]

No related posts.