United’s Sour Note.
In days gone by, you could irritate customers, lie to them or otherwise treat them like crap, and there wasn’t a whole lot they could do about it. Oh, yeah, they could write threatening letters, tell all their friends and promise to never do business with you again. One nattily-dressed gentlemen I would pass everyday when I worked in San Francisco even protested in front of Bank of America wearing a sandwich board. But for the most part, that dissatisfaction stayed between you and the customer.
My how things have changed.
Today, when a customer feels he’s been wronged, he probably won’t keep it to himself. In addition to feedback sites (like yelp.com) and others, where one can express an opinion on anything from the freshness of a flower arrangement to the food at a restaurant to the customer service of a web site, there are more creative avenues he may take. Like create a Facebook page for unhappy customers. Launch a website named “yourcompanysucks.com”. Contribute to blogs or message boards. Or, he may choose to do what Dave Carroll of the alt/country band Sons of Maxwell did: create a music video and post it on YouTube.
Carroll’s video, named “United Breaks Guitars,” chronicles his exasperation at being treated indignantly by United Airlines customer service folks after the carrier severely damaged his $3500 Taylor acoustic guitar (in plain view) on the tarmac of O’Hare International.
While I’m sure everyone involved at United would claim they were “just doing their jobs,” the bottom line is that Dave Carroll wasn’t taken care of at a very critical touchpoint. No one at United felt his pain or became his advocate. And the video he created has gone viral and been viewed by more than 3.5 million people.
The result for United: not just more bad stories about the airline being circulated, but a finger to the eye of its position of “Fly the Friendly Skies.” Who’s going to believe the airline’s paid messages when you have real customers telling and forwarding stories like this?
While this case represents how the web’s transparency can create huge customer service problems, it’s also a case of how it also creates one-of-a-kind opportunities. When, Bob Taylor, co-founder of Taylor Guitars, found out about it, he made a video response supporting Dave, and launched a series of videos on his web site about how to safely travel with a guitar. Then he did what United should have done—replaced Dave’s beloved guitar.
Great PR for Taylor. A nightmare for United. And in this case, a bit of instant celebrity for one guitar-totin’ hero. All wrapped up in one.
As a bit of a diversion, I present another video, of one of my favorite artists, John Hiatt, performing a song on Letterman he wrote a few years back about broken guitars (of the celeb variety). Enjoy.
Posted by Mickey
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